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The Long Lane's Turning

by Hallie Erminie Rives · English · Gutenberg #35326 · 523,901 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Long Lane's Turning

Author: Hallie Erminie Rives

Illustrator: Frances Rogers


        
Release date: August 21, 2011 [eBook #35326]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35326

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG LANE'S TURNING ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear undertone,
audible only to him, which faltered the merest trifle (Page 316.)]






THE LONG LANE'S TURNING


BY

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

(Mrs. Post Wheeler)


Author of "Satan Sanderson" "Hearts Courageous," "The Valiants of
Virginia," etc.



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

FRANCES ROGERS




NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1917




Copyright, 1916, 1917

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

as "The Heart of a Man"


Copyright, 1917

By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

       I  THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE
      II  A MAN AND A WOMAN
     III  THE AWAKENING
      IV  THE PRODIGAL
       V  THE UNLAID GHOST
      VI  THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT
     VII  ARROWS OF DESIRE
    VIII  THE THRUST
      IX  THE TURN OF THE LONG LANE
       X  AFTER A YEAR
      XI  CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON
     XII  A HOSTAGE TO THE BOTTLE
    XIII  THE HEART OF A MAN
     XIV  THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
      XV  THE ONLY WAY
     XVI  DERELICT
    XVII  LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
   XVIII  THE PRICE
     XIX  PADDY THE BRICK INTERVENES
      XX  WHAT MATTERED MOST
     XXI  CRAIG'S WAY
    XXII  HARRY DECIDES
   XXIII  THE BROKEN PICTURE
    XXIV  THE WOMAN WHO KNEW
     XXV  ON TRIAL
    XXVI  THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW
   XXVII  THE END OF THE JOURNEY
  XXVIII  THE MAN IN THE WHEELED CHAIR
    XXIX  THE LONE BATTLE
     XXX  THE GIPSY RING
    XXXI  AMBUSH
   XXXII  THE COMING OF JOHN STARK
  XXXIII  THE UNDERSTUDY
   XXXIV  THE CRUCIBLE
    XXXV  SANCTUARY
   XXXVI  JUBILEE JIM'S JOURNEY
  XXXVII  THE CALL
 XXXVIII  THE CHALLENGE
   XXXIX  THE JAILBIRD
      XL  GENTLEMEN ALL
     XLI  DARK DAYS
    XLII  THE MENDED ROAD
   XLIII  THE PITFALL
    XLIV  THE LIGHTED FUSE
     XLV  THE CHASM
    XLVI  CRAIG STRIKES
   XLVII  WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
  XLVIII  THE HEART OF A WOMAN
    XLIX  THE GOVERNOR TAKES A HAND
       L  REVELATION




ILLUSTRATIONS


Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear
  undertone, audible only to him, which faltered
  the merest trifle. (Page 316) . . . _Frontispiece_

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.
  You will please consider it final"

He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
  "Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet

All at once the hound flung up his great head with a
  low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless
  hand that hung down




THE LONG LANE'S TURNING




CHAPTER I

THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE

The dark was falling over the court-room.  A lurid ray of the setting
sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled
disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an
awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in
their wall-brackets.  Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces
of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls
and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the
room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at
the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now
considering their verdict in an upper room--to return again and again
to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices
had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day.

He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and
frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting
from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a
thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair.  In the pallid lamp-light the
hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded
and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.

To a stranger there would have seemed little in the circumstances to
inspire the popular interest the full room betokened.  The accused was
a rough sawyer, known to his fellows of the logging camp as "Paddy the
Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him.  The
crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings,
the story merely one of those sordid dramas of menial life which were
so familiar.  The evidence, though purely circumstantial, was, to a
casual eye, sufficiently conclusive.

Yet in the minds of most of those who had filled the dingy court room
during the two days just passed, there had been until the last hour a
general expectation that the man would be cleared.  This had been based
upon nothing save the common knowledge that his counsel was Harry
Sevier.

The latter had never failed to justify the expectations that had
habitually heralded his doings.  Young, likable, perfectly equipped and
knowing his southern world, he had returned, after a half dozen years
of foreign schooling, to step into a social niche readily accorded him
by those who had seen little of him since boyhood.  His grey eyes and
crisp, dark beard, had been distinguishing marks of forebears whose
lives had been lived in that neighbourhood and who had left their vivid
impress upon the institutions of their time; statesmen, diplomats and
soldiers had been of that line, and he himself, with his characteristic
mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the
social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his
type.  Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable
property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money
judiciously, if lavishly.  His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as
his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in
appointment.  He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he
occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be
dominated "pink teas" by the envious unbidden, were affairs to which an
_entree_ was a hallmark.  He maintained also a shooting-box on an upper
slope of the Blue Ridge--a comfortable bungalow set in a hundred acres
of wilderness--whither of autumns he and a dozen other choice spirits
were wont to fare for a fortnight's tramping and fishing, sleeping on
pungent hemlock boughs and eating homely food cooked by the single
negro servant who lived there as caretaker.  He had a gift for private
theatricals--he was in constant demand of the Amateur Dramatic
Club--and had more than a _dilettante_ appreciation of music and art.

As regards his profession, he had injected into the somewhat
cut-and-dried legal life of the old Capital an unusual and winning
element of personality and a method at variance with established usage.
His very eccentricities had set him apart from the mass, who were so
glamoured with the sordid things of life; and the apparent contempt for
material reward with which he defended poor and unknown clients as
readily as rich and influential ones had its appeal to a class which
possessed imagination and ideals.  There had seldom been a case in
which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic--an
apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the
unvital and immaterial--as a preliminary to a swift _volte-face_ by
which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of
inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory
which captivated and--for the moment--convinced.  In the four years in
which he had stamped his individuality upon the town, not only had he
never lost a criminal case, but he had created a certain conviction
that a trial in which he figured would offer unmistakable elements of
surprise and entertainment.  So that the Criminal Court had come, in a
way, to be the fashion, and the sombre chambers of justice saw many an
assemblage that would have graced another sort of gathering.

Seldom, however, on this day had Harry's glance through his gold-rimmed
eye-glasses wandered to the benches.  With many there he had danced and
golfed and bridged a hundred times.  That, however, had been play;
this, which had come to furnish another and quite as fascinating a sort
of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more
serious business--in so far as anything had been serious to him--of his
life.  So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his
personality for the sober business in hand, set over against the
palpable frivolity of purpose that actuated the moiety of his audience,
was, after all, only another indication to them of that fine sense of
the fitting for which his world admired him.

Through the long morning the evidence had accumulated.  One by one the
merciless rivets had been driven home by the prosecuting attorney.  The
chain of evidence seemed flawless.  And Harry Sevier's
cross-examination had seemed scarcely more than perfunctory--had
appeared somehow to miss that subtle and pregnant suggestion, that
longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but
baffling doubt.  Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more
effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological
moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the
nicely calculated spoke in the wheel that, under the manipulation of
the state's attorney, was rolling so swiftly in its ominous course; and
on the back-benches, where sat a group of members of the Country Club,
a whispered bet that the accused this time would not get off, found as
usual no taker.

Evidence finished, the Court rose for a recess and Harry vanished
through a side-door.  Ten minutes later he was in his office.  He
vouchsafed no word to the clerk who sat in the outer room, but passed
quickly through to the inner sanctum and closed and locked the door.
The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had
slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained.  There were
moist drops upon his forehead but his hands were arid and dry.  He drew
the blind to shut out the dull, grey, winter light and switched on the
electric desk-lamp, and as he did so his eyes turned stealthily to the
wall--to a locked cabinet whose key was in his pocket.

They turned again almost immediately to the baize-covered desk, where
stood a plain, flat silver frame.  It held a photograph of a portrait
painted by Sargent which had been a _salon_ favourite of a few years
before.  It was that of a young girl, seated and leaning intently
forward from an arm chair.  One hand was at her throat, the other
dropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and
in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of
life.  The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty
held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the
result of the selection and inbreeding of generations.  He stood still
a moment, looking fixedly at it, his tongue touching his lips, before
he crossed the room and turned the picture face-down upon the desk.  He
almost ran to the cabinet, unlocked its mirrored door, and took from it
a bottle and a glass.  He poured out a full goblet of the gurgling
liquid and drank it off.  Then he drew a long breath.

"Yes," he said, "I'll lie to myself no more!  I've got to have it or
throw up the sponge.  It was my own once, that wonderful gift--whatever
it is.  Once it was my own brain, unhelped, that sent the glow to my
heart and the fire to my tongue--till words had glorious colours and
pictures painted themselves out of nothing.  Once it was my own mind
that saw a problem as clear as crystal.  But I wasn't content.  I
wanted the short cut, and this showed me the way.  And now--now--I've
dropped the reins.  It's not Harry Sevier that wins cases--it's that
bottle!"

He began to stride up and down the narrow room; deep lines had etched
themselves in the mobile face.  "There was the Davencourt Case," he
said to himself.  "Not a shred of decent evidence to go on, and the
whole court packed with prejudice, and he was as guilty as the devil.
Yet I won!  That was only a year ago, but I couldn't do it now--without
what is in that decanter!  All day yesterday I was heavy, my mind was
as blank as a glacier.  In the cross-examination I couldn't see a foot
before me.  But for this half-hour it would go hard with my client at
the finish.  As it is I wouldn't want a better foil than old Maitland
for the prosecution.  How he has slaved over his witnesses!  I might
have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a
cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way.  For this
'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness.  Half
the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee.
But pshaw! what's the use?  I can get him off without it.  In the last
analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them--feeling first,
and then conscience.  Every man of them must see _himself_, first
shivering in the shoes of my thief, and then wearing the Judge's gown.
When the psychological moment comes there is only to drive home the
fallibility of circumstantial evidence and sear those twelve
slow-going, matter-of-fact brains with a sense of the inherent
perversity of appearances!"  He smiled bitterly.  "Especially," he
added, "when there's whisky in the story.  My client was drunk as a
boiled owl when he was arrested--the stolen plunder might easily have
been put on him, as he claims it was.  The jury will understand that.
There's probably not a man on it who doesn't get squiffy now and then."

He stopped in his walk and held up a hand against the light--it wavered
ever so little.  The draught had not yet brought its accustomed poise
of nerve--its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence.  With an
impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet.  "One used to do it,"
he said; "it will evidently take more to-day to restore our bold Turpin
to his career on the highway!"  He set the empty glass in its place
with a short laugh.

"Curious," he said.  "If he _were_ innocent and drink _had_ got him
into this scrape, there would be a poetic justice in drink's getting
him out!"

As he turned to lock the cabinet, the bell of his desk-telephone
rang--three short, sharp rings.  It was the clerk's warning that the
court was about to reassemble.  He drew a deep breath, and cast a quick
glance at the little mirrored door.  No tinge was rising in his
colourless face, no warming tingle in his veins.  His hands were
uncertain and his fingers had an odd numbness.  A keen, cold edge of
anxiety touched him.  Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black
decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change--the gradual glow
creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for
a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed
ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his
brain.  The signal was too long in coming to-day--and he could not
wait!  His hand shook as it reached again to the little shelf.  An
instant he hesitated--for a breath, while the light twinkled from the
deep-cut facets, he strove to remember whether he had drunk one glass
or two.  Then with a frown he poured the draught and drinking it off,
locked the cabinet, and went hurriedly out.

When he entered the courtroom, the wide space had filled again and the
State's Attorney had opened his address--a brief one, icily emotionless
and rigidly exact--the very background upon which so often Harry
Sevier's winged words had spelled victory for a cause prejudged as
lost.  And he was to reply--with the final speech for whose inspiration
he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office.  Paddy
the Brick listened with the look of some trapped thing gazing at its
captor, sometimes turning toward his counsel a furtive wavering glance
that was blent equally of dread and dog-like appeal.  These glances
were unreturned.  Harry Sevier sat motionless, his eyes straight before
him.

But behind that mask Harry's thought was turning and turning upon
itself.  The sudden sharp edge of anxiety that had caught him in his
office had grown to a thriving fear.  His ally was failing him.  The
master, whose upper hand he had just acknowledged--whose aid had been
so freely given him in really vital moments--was forsaking him at the
turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery!  He realised
it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled with a dull anger at
the littleness of the issue, and through the confused mist of his mind
his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter--as though
the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.

He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties,
while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled
reared and struggled vainly.  Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and
logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this
with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie
outside of himself--to associate itself strangely with the prisoner.
But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated
force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had
had their way in the past were absent.  He had a curious feeling of
duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn
apart--the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which
clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother and of
the despairing face of the man with the wiry sand-coloured hair who sat
slouched in his chair beside him.

The roomful seemed very still.  The Judge was looking at him fixedly,
through bowed horn-glasses set far down on his nose.  Harry was aware
that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy
relief struggled together.  With desperate narrowness he watched the
faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that
betokened a quickened and awakening interest.  But they sat moveless
and impassive.  There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the
foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused
further struggle.  He knew that he had been betrayed.  The door of
human sympathy would not open--he had lost the magic key.

The reply of the State's Attorney was a mere _resume_ of the evidence.
He had needed no more.  The Judge's charge was brief.  Then had come
the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers--the shuffling of
feet as the Judge retired and the jurors filed out--and at length the
painful hiatus with the red sunlight and the pallid lamps.

This was broken presently by three measured raps on the door of the
jury-room, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors.
They were quickly polled and the verdict given--guilty.  The sentence
followed immediately.

With the fateful words Harry Sevier turned his eyes, almost as if
suddenly awakening from sleep, upon the court-room, and met across the
moving benches a woman's concentrated and wondering look.  She was Echo
Allen, the original of the portrait whose photograph lay face-down upon
his office desk.  The neutral-tinted presentment, however, had been far
from realising the concrete flush of sensuous beauty of its living
original, with her straight lithe frame, her hair all a wash of warm
russets and sunny golds, framing a face perfect in contour and with a
complexion as soft as a moth's wing.  And the beauty of this was now
deepened, if possible, by the shadow upon it of puzzled pain and
inquiry.  An instant the gaze between them hung, then it broke as she
turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow,
hesitant gesture.  With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that
rushed through him--for he had not seen her there before that
moment--something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the
rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties.  The emptying
room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny
electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his
fingers.  Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he
did not recognise it.  He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly
understood.  He had always regarded with wondering distaste the
occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect of alcohol
with which he was familiar in men of his class, and the vulgar spree
filled him with disgust.  He was nicely abstemious at his club and he
had never entered a saloon in his life.  His indulgences, deeper and
more and more frequent as they had grown of late, had been hidden
behind the shades of his inner office, and the liquor he had drunk
there he had never carried in his legs.  For him these cloistered hours
had meant no harrowing aftermath of remorse, no shrinking memory of
license or ribaldry, but only the strange mental exaltation that had
borne him to success.  He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but
mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions
that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.

He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching
figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand.
He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the
perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional
regret.  But he did not speak.  Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes
stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his
side and a painful blur swept across his vision.  His unsober,
kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished
beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed
by sullen scowl and sneering bravado--a concrete fact, perturbing and
vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.

With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the
emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited.  "Anywhere,
Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop,
if it's a thousand miles!"

As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his
face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid
moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing
he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his
brain.  He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.

"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped.  "He never did it, by God!"




CHAPTER II

A MAN AND A WOMAN

The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across
the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of
feeling.  She was nonplussed.  She had entered for that last hour
sharing intuitively the general belief that the prisoner would be
acquitted: a belief, founded like that of the rest, upon her knowledge
of his counsel.  She had seen no straining for the spectacular in what
some had been wont to call "Harry Sevier's pyrotechnics," and on past
occasions on which she had heard him address a jury she had fallen
wholly under the spell of that peculiar magnetism that swayed all
alike.  Aside from his continuous success in a calling with which her
whole life had been associated--her father, Judge Beverly Allen, was
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and his father had been Chancellor
before him--with his brilliant way, his undenied leadership among his
fellows, he had been to her a dominant personality.  She had not lacked
the masculine homage of a dozen others of their set, but Harry Sevier
had always been the imminent figure in her thought, and it had needed
no spoken word or promise between them to link her imagination wholly
to a future in which he reigned supreme.  So that his failure to-day
had affected her strongly.

On the dusky court house steps she stopped to exchange greetings with a
group who chatted there.  They were full of the puzzle of Sevier's
failure, or laughingly rueful at their own discomfiture, and she
stopped but a moment before a negro coachman tucked her into a
carriage.  As he climbed lumberingly to his seat and gathered up the
reins, a heavy, assured figure approached the curb.  Cameron Craig was
big and broad and in his strong and arrogant face lines of conflict had
early etched themselves.  He shook hands with her with a smile.

"I didn't know you were in town," she said, with a trace of aloofness.

"I'm here for only a day or two," he answered.  "I had to talk a little
politics with my attorney, Mr. Treadwell.  It's his busy day, it seems,
and as the mountain couldn't come to Mahomet, Mahomet came to the
mountain.  So here I am at the halls of justice.  It's been an
entertaining afternoon--the trial, I mean--but upon my word, I thought
at first I had strayed into a convention of the Daughters of the
Confederacy."

She smiled, but it came with difficulty.  "Oh, court has become a
social dissipation with us.  It competes now with auction-bridge and
the fox-trot."

"You tempt me to steal a purse or two," he said.  "I love to hold the
centre of the stage.  The only thing I've been charged with stealing so
far is an election, but one never knows to what heights he may rise.
If I pick your pocket will you come to my trial?"

"If it were _my_ pocket, I'd have to, wouldn't I?"

He bowed smilingly and turned away, as the coachman flicked the tossing
manes with the tip of his whip.  Looking over her shoulder, while the
horses whirled her away, Echo saw his big frame swinging up the steps
into the emptying building, every move expressive of virile strength
and conscious power.

These were traits Cameron Craig had acquired through direct
inheritance.  His father had come penniless, to a small town in the
adjoining state where, with calm assurance and without unnecessary
delay, he had married the neighbourhood's prettiest girl and pre-empted
a worn-out iron deposit with a tumble-down furnace, relic of a series
of disgusted British owners.  With the same certainty of judgment he
had uncovered the lost ore, developed the property till it paid a
miraculous dividend, and died.  He had been a man of one idea--the
"Works"--and had known and cared for nothing else.  The son, however,
with his father's force and will, had inherited, with less praiseworthy
traits, a further ambition.  The young Cameron Craig's first free act
after his schooling ended was to dispose of the iron plant and to throw
his money and his brain together into a group which now stood back of
the great Public Services Corporation that held in control the vested
interests of two states, exclusive of the railroads.  At thirty he was
a personality that loomed large in organised politics, and might be
depended on to loom steadily larger to the end of the chapter.

As he entered the old building now he was thinking of the face of the
girl he had just left, with its brilliant beauty and flashing youth.

"Why not?" he said to himself.  "She has birth and breeding, but I can
match them with things the world counts as high.  I've never failed yet
to get what I wanted--if I wanted it enough!"  His thoughts recurred to
the trial and to Harry Sevier.  "Curious that nobody seemed to guess
what the matter was--none but me.  But I know what that look back of
his eyes meant.  The young fool!  To have that gift--every thing right
in his hand--and then to throw it away.  For that's what it will come
to, sure as fate, in the end!"

A hand fell upon his shoulder.  It was Lawrence Treadwell, the
attorney, and he followed the latter into a private room and sat down.
"Have you got the new committee list?" he asked, without preamble.

For answer the other took a closely written paper from his pocket and
handed it over.  "Senator Colby sent it down by his secretary this
morning."

Craig drew his chair to the table and began to make pencilled changes
and corrections, his hand moving swiftly and unhesitatingly.  "There,"
he said, returning it.  "That will be better.  Let the senator have it
back to-morrow."  He sat a moment silent, his strong white fingers
drumming on the table.  "By the way, is this young Sevier likely to
take a hand in the next campaign?"

"I don't know," replied the other.  "I've always expected him to burst
into politics some day.  He has a curious hold on people--a wonderful
magnetism.  To-day's is the first jury case I've ever known him to
lose.  He as well as let it go by default.  How he came to handle it so
beats me!"

Craig might have enlightened him, but he did not.

"I've concluded we don't want him," he said.  "He's uneven: the trial
to-day proved that.  Besides, he's too high-chinned--we can't depend on
his type to obey orders.  We are coming to a big fight and we want the
docks clear.  No overtures to him.  We must cut out every man whose
absolute footing we can't count on till the day of judgment."

The attorney lit a cigar and regarded its blue haze thoughtfully before
he answered.  "All right," he agreed.  "I should have picked him for
good material.  But you're the doctor."


Meanwhile the carriage was whirling Echo Allen over the darkening
asphalt.  The tired night lay still, watching under dusky lids, the
moon, a great blown magnolia, floating in the limpid sky.  As the
horses pounded on, the coachman's voice broke in upon her revery:

"Reck'n Marse Harry done got dat man clar, Miss Echo, lak he allus do?"

She drew her furs closer about her throat with a little gesture as
though dismissing a baffling problem.  "No, 'Lige; not this time."

"Sho' now!" he exclaimed, looking back with his thick, blue-black lips
framed to a whistle.  "Muss-a been pow'ful guilty ef _he_ couldn't git
him off.  Ah reck'n dem yuthah lawyahs 'cluded dey wanter tek Marse
Harry down--he done put it ovah _dem_ so off'n--en dey jes' tek dat
'cused man, en fool eroun', en fool eroun', tell dey done _prove_ it on
him!"

But 'Lige's sage reflection upon the situation brought no smile to Echo
Allen's face.

At length the horses came to a great double-gate, lighted with heavy
wrought-iron lamps, opening on a curving drive, into which they turned,
to swing panting up to a wide-porched mansion set in a grove of oaks
and acacias.  This was "Midfields," the home of the Allens for four
generations and of the Beverlys before them.  Its wide wings and
columned front spoke of old colony days, as did its name of a time when
rolling acres of tobacco instead of suburban streets surrounded it.
Twilight was drifting thickly over it now, and the box-hedged garden,
with its plenteous rose-shrubs and wild sun-dial, was purpled with
shadow.

Echo jumped down without assistance and ran into the hall, throwing off
her hat and coat and pausing before a glass to pat into place the
rebellious whorls of her springing, gold-brown hair before she entered
the dimly-lighted library.

It was a wide, pleasant room, with tradition and gentle birth in every
line of its furnishing.  The table held an old China lamp of gilt and
_lapis-lazuli_ blue, and the simple, colonial book-cases were of
rich-veined mahogany which held the same shimmering, tawny lights as
Echo's hair and had leaded-glass doors in key with the silver,
glass-prismed candle-sticks on the mantel-piece.  A huge old English
screen of painted leather stood at one side.  On the dull green walls
were framed steel engravings of the ancestral home of the Allens in
Dorsetshire and of that sturdy ancestor, in lace and peruke, whose
rugged signature is on the Declaration.  The place had but one modern
touch--a splendid portrait of Echo herself that hung between two great
windows--the canvas whose photograph at that moment lay face-down in
Harry Sevier's inner office.

In the room sat her father, the Judge, perusing a magazine.  He was a
pale, placid man, straight and grey as a silver-birch, with ivory,
distinguished features that suggested an old daguerreotype and seemed
to call for a silk-velvet waistcoat and a stock.  He tossed the
magazine aside as she came to him and stooping, in a swift birdlike way
she had, dropped a kiss on the top of his billowy, grey hair.

"There you are," she chided, "ruining your poor eyes with fine print in
this wretched light!"

She turned the reading-lamp higher and drew the curtains.  As she
pulled the heavy folds together they swept from its place a heavy brass
bowl filled with Marechal Niel roses, and it fell with a crash onto a
frail Italian desk of dark rosewood quaintly inlaid with designs in
lighter colour, which sat in a corner.

She sprang to catch it with a cry.  "I'm as bad as Uncle Nelson!" she
exclaimed.  "How lucky it didn't spill!"  She set the bowl back and
passed a hand along the polished desk-top, frowning.  "It has made a
terrific dent in the poor old thing!" she said, remorsefully.  "It must
have jarred it frightfully.  I'm so sorry!"  She looked at her father,
who had half risen at her cry.  "You were always fond of the little old
desk, though you never used it.  I used to love it when I was a child.
It was so mysterious, with its tiny cubby-holes and carvings.  Some one
told me once that such foreign desks always had secret drawers and I
used to spend hours trying to find one.  Where did it come from?  Did
it belong to grandfather?"

"No.  It was willed to me many years ago by--a friend.  It was when you
were a baby."

"How curious," she said, "for a man to choose a piece of furniture like
that!  Why, it's as feminine as a toilet-table!"  She came and perched
one small toe on the fender, as he asked: "Where's Nancy!"

"I haven't seen her since luncheon.  She was going to tea at Cora
Spottiswoode's."

"Her father has written me she must come home at the end of the week,"
said the Judge.  "He says if she doesn't he'll start an action against
somebody for kidnapping--says nobody can fix his coffee just right but
her."

She smiled.  The two families were life-long friends and since their
boarding-school days she and Nancy Langham had exchanged annual visits.
"I'll tell her," she said.  "I wish she could stay longer, though it's
lonely for her father, no doubt.  I love to have her here.  She's--fond
of Chilly, and I've been hoping it--might have an influence over him."

The Judge sighed.  The name of Chisholm Allen, Echo's twin-brother, was
a synonym in the city for debonair devil-may-care.  With the likeliness
that kept him popular even among those staid members of society who did
not countenance his peccadillos, he combined a negligence and
dissipation that from his boyhood had made him a thorn-in-the-flesh to
his father.

"Yes," he said, "she's fond of him.  That's why I think she shouldn't
stay too long."

There was silence for a moment.  Then he said in a lighter tone, "I
wonder how Sevier's case came out.  It was expected to finish to-day,
wasn't it?"

"Oh," she answered, "he lost.  The jury found against him.  I was there
for an hour, just at the end."

He made an exclamation of surprise, and stole a quick glance at her,
but she had bent down to straighten a shoe-buckle and he could not see
her face.  "Ah well," he said, "it won't do him any harm to get a
set-back now and then.  Perhaps he needs it.  Were there many there?"

"Half the world," she answered.  "I saw Cameron Craig."

"So he is in town, eh?  I must send a note to the hotel and ask him to
luncheon to-morrow."

She was silent and he said quizzically.  "Come, my dear, you mustn't be
such a chin-tilted patrician.  'Other times, other manners.'  Craig has
his place, and it's not a low one, either."

She made a move of impatience.  "He's a member of the best clubs in his
own city, and all that, I know.  He belongs there.  But here it is
different.  We are not beholden to him.  Why should we go out of our
way to treat him like one of us?  He isn't, really.  He may be a
University man and he may have travelled all over the world.  Yes, and
I'll admit he has manners--_a_ manner, if you like--too.  But there's
something that keeps him an outsider just the same.  Besides, people
tell unpleasant tales about him."

Her father cleared his throat.  Gossip had been prolific in tales of
Craig as regarded the fairer--and frailer--sex.  He had heard the
stories--unsavoury ones, such as inevitably cling to men, whatever
their business or social standing, who acquire the whispered reputation
of the voluptuary.  He had himself, however, a singular reserve of
judgment, coupled with an impatient intolerance of scandal.  Men to him
were as he found them, till the event proved otherwise.

"I know what you mean," he said judicially.  "He hasn't our traditions
and standards.  That's true.  He's not born to them.  But this is an
uncharitable world, my dear, and half the tattle one hears is apt to be
sheer envy.  He is a person of importance.  He has a good deal of
influence, as well as money, and is affiliated with men with whom a
large part of my earlier life was associated."

She hardly heard his closing words: "Influence and money!" she
repeated, with a little shrug.  "Why need we bother about them!  The
Judiciary, thank heaven! has nothing to do with political influence,
and as for money, I should hate to think that what we have came, like
his, from the United Distilleries!"

"Echo!"  The name fell sharply behind them.

Both turned--the Judge a little self-consciously--to where his wife
stood in the doorway.  She was already dressed for dinner and her dark
corsage set off her white neck and beautifully rounded shoulders--a
cool, statuesque woman, of unfailing poise and manner, with her grey
hair perfectly disposed above a complexion whose tinting was the
despair of many a younger matron.  Instinctively the girl's hand had
crept into the Judge's arm, and insensibly the two had drawn a shade
nearer together.

Mrs. Allen stood looking at them a moment, faintly smiling, before she
said deliberately, "That is a ridiculous way of talking.  Please let me
remind you that your father was the Trust's counsel for many years, and
until he went on the Bench."

"Oh, I forgot--" she began, distressed.  "I only meant--"

"There, there!" the Judge said, frowning.  "People feel differently
about those things.  You have a perfect right to think in that way, if
you choose."

"I couldn't think anything _you_ did was wrong," she cried
passionately.  "And, anyway, giving a company legal advice is very far
from being in its business.  _Every one_ has to have lawyers, of
course.  They defend even criminals."

He smiled quizzically at her argument.  "Well," he countered, "I'm
respectable in my old age, at any rate."  He had pressed a bell as he
spoke and to the grizzled negro who now entered he said, "Nelson, has
your Marse Chilly come in yet?  If he has I'd like to see him."

The old man shook his head.  "Marse Chilly done tellyfoam he won' be
home fo' dinnah, suh."

The Judge pulled his chin, palpably annoyed, but quick to his resentful
mood, Echo laid her hand caressingly on his arm.

"Never mind, dear," she said coaxingly.  "Don't fret about Chilly."

Mrs. Allen's voice interposed.  "Chilly sent me the message an hour
ago," she said, with an accent that seemed finally to dismiss the
topic.  "I think you would better dress now, Echo.  Nancy has been in
some time, and dinner's at seven-thirty."




CHAPTER III

THE AWAKENING

An automobile speeding through the starry dark!  No hesitant progress
through congested traffic, no frequent swerving for daylight wayfarers.
The city was far behind now--only the clear, well-nigh deserted road,
winding like a tremulous magenta ribbon through the swooping gloom that
seemed to shrink and cringe from the metal monster hurtling after its
golden halo through the eddying dust.

A practised hand was on the throttle and the yellow-lined face bent
over the wheel was shrewd and keen.  There had been no supper for Bob
that night and no evening at Black Joe's billiard parlour, but the
chauffeur knew his master.  "Go like the devil till I tell you to
stop," the other had said, and without the word from the moveless
figure on the rear seat, he would obey till the engine stopped or his
hand went numb on the wheel.  Hamlets flashed by--huddles of flaring
street-lights--then shadow and blankness again.  Now and then a hollow
rumbling marked a bridge, or a jovial, beckoning doorway betokened a
road-house.  Ten, twenty, thirty miles.  A turn of the wheel and the
car swept into a divergent highway.  Another mile and again a turn--Bob
was shuttling back and forth now, fearful of an impossible distance
from home.

The man behind him sat as if graven in stone.  At first, while his
senses instinctively resisted the intoxication, Harry had been
conscious only of blind movement, a frantic flight to escape the
unescapable.  Yet his whole body was tense, his eyes never wavered, his
hand was as steady as his chauffeur's.  He was sharply conscious of all
about him, every sense recording its message unerringly.  He felt the
wind-flung dust, heard the chatter of the exhaust, grasped acutely at
each detail of sight and sound in the reeling panorama through which
they passed with such arrow-like swiftness, under a sky that was a
wild, blue field of silver flowers.  Yet the governance of the mind,
the sole arena in which the intoxicant ravened and rioted, the logical
faculty to which sense-impression is but material, was astray.  And at
length the intoxication had wholly conquered.

And with the acknowledged dominance of the sinister thing that held
him, the mental turmoil had swiftly stilled.  There had come sudden
composure--a strange, appalling peace, in which was no appreciation of
place or time or fact, but yet a curious exaltation, a sensation of
seeing not through a glass darkly, but with a further mental vision
which knew no material bars.

Three hours, four hours--and still no sign.  Bob stole a glance behind
him.  "Wonder what's the matter?" he muttered.  "He sure never did want
to go hell-bent-for-election like this before.  Lucky I filled the tank
plumb full this morning.  She's good for another forty mile, I reckon."

As he withdrew his eyes he became aware of a red light swinging down
into the road--a railway-crossing.  He threw himself forward on the
gear and with a grinding roar the brakes took hold.  Plunging and
shuddering, the car stopped dead, its forward lamps jingling against
the warning bar.

With the sudden stop Harry lurched forward.  And, curiously, with the
abrupt cessation of motion and roar, the vast, vague distance through
which his mind had been shuttling, closed instantly up.  The baleful
intoxication had lifted as it had come.  He did not wake fully at once,
for the breaking of the spell left him in a strange confusion through
which he saw but dimly the outlines of the real present.  He found
himself sitting dazed and shaken in his motor--staring at the broad
back of his chauffeur beyond which, an isolated point in the darkness
of the night, swung the angry red lantern of the crossing.  He put a
hand to his forehead--what was he doing there?

It was coming back to him.  He remembered the straining trial, the hour
in his inner office--with the little wall-cabinet!  He saw the crowded
courtroom, saw himself standing impotent before the bar, saw the
despairing face of the man beside him, the puzzled countenances about
him, the dim lamps.  He heard verdict and sentence.  He saw himself
turn to gaze into the face of the girl across the court-room--knew the
swift rush of the motor, the blazing arc lights and that final stab of
realisation!

His lips tightened to shut back something like a groan, as there rushed
upon him a sense of horror, of disgust, of shame.  The Harry Sevier he
had been--the Harry Sevier of good repute, of disdain for the
intemperate, of brilliant accomplishment and regular habit, was gazing
with horrified eyes at the Harry Sevier he had unwittingly become, the
slave of the spirit he had so long invoked, whose coarse debauch had
to-day betrayed his client, and sent an innocent man to the wretched
cell of a convict!

He spoke.  "Bob, where are we?"

The chauffeur stole a quick glance behind him--there was relief in it.
"Penitentiary-Crossing, sir," he said.  "There's the Black Maria."  He
pointed to one side, where the gloomy vehicle, a wheeled ark with a
narrow barred window set in its rear, waited with its patient mules.

The train was at the crossing now and the rumble of the brakes swelled
to a vibrant screech, the long dotted line of dimly-lighted windows
shuddering to a stop right athwart the road.  A train-man with a
lantern jumped down, followed by a couple of passengers.  Harry opened
the door of the tonneau and suddenly conscious that he was stiff and
aching in every joint, achieved the ground and took a step toward the
train.

Two figures just then emerged from the glare.  He saw that they were
linked together by a wrist and as the coat of one blew aside, the
lights of the motor glinted from a nickel star--the badge of a
deputy-sheriff.  They had passed him, and the train was moving again to
the _chug-chug_ of the engine, when the officer turned back, biting the
end from a cigar.

"Could you give me a light?" he asked.

"Certainly."  Sevier took a silver match-box from his pocket.

The other struck the match, hauling irritably at his lagging prisoner,
and the red light, flaring up, for an instant showed the two faces, the
sheriff's grim and tenacious, and the one beside it--a white, dogged
face, with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.

Sevier shrank as though at a blow in the face.  He drew a sharp breath,
for the sight pierced to the excoriate spot that lay like a live coal
in his soul.  There before him stood his client of that day's trial, on
the last lap of his dismal journey, the man whom he, Harry Sevier, had
sent there!  Back of this man of the law, with his gleaming star and
pocket revolver, he saw himself standing, the real mainspring of that
blatant enginery.

The flare of the match fell.  "Well, good night to you," said the
deputy-sheriff.

"Hold on," said Harry.  "Can a prisoner use money?"

"They're not supposed to, but I reckon money talks as loud in a
concrete cell as anywhere else."

Sevier had taken some crisp yellow-backs from his pocket and now he
held them out--to the jailbird.  "Here!" he said.  "Take this."

The other looked at the bills with a suddenly contorted face, then with
a whirl of his unfettered hand dashed them on the ground.  "Keep your
money!" he snarled.  "I'm a thief--that's what _I_ am now!  When I want
money I'll steal it!"

The sheriff made an exclamation, and jerked viciously on the tethered
wrist.  "Don't you mind, sir," he said.  "You mean it well, but this is
an ugly one.  Lord love you, they'll soon take that out of him over
there!  Come along, you," he added to the other, pulling him toward the
Black Maria, "and if you open your face like that I'll give you what
for!"

Sevier stood an instant looking dully after them, then mechanically
picked up the fallen bills, fumblingly replaced them in his pocket, and
climbed into the motor.  He felt his face suddenly hot.  In those flung
words his judicial mind recognised the indictment.  From the little
wall-cabinet in his inner-office had crept a thing of shame and
humiliation to himself.  He saw this now suddenly swell and grow--as
did the vapour from the fisherman's cruse--to a blighting, tentacled
thing, reaching interminably into the future, holding in its coils a
human life of pain, of desperate warfare, of social outlawry.

He sat down on the leather cushions like one in a dream.

"Home now, Bob," he said, heavily.




CHAPTER IV

THE PRODIGAL

At Midfields that evening the late moonlight poured a flood of radiance
on the wide columned porch with its climbing roses where Echo sat on
the step, chin in hand, absorbed in her own thought.  She was alone.
Nancy had slipped off to bed, her mother had retired to her room and
her father to the quiet of the library and his reading.

From the kitchens she could hear the muffled clash of table-silver and
the strident voice of Aunt Emily the cook, grumbling at Nelson:
"Yo'-all hurry erlong wid dem ar fawks, now!  Speck ah's gwine wait
heah all _night_, yo' triflin' trash, yo'?  Yo' heah me--yo' ain'
blind!  What yo' 'spose Marse Bev'ly _pay_ yo' fo', anyhow?"  From far
down the road, beyond the gates, she could hear the faint twang of a
guitar and the refrain of strolling, darky voices:

  "Reign!  Reign!  Reign-a mah Lawd!
    Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!
  Reign salvation in-a mah soul,
    Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!"

These died away with the sharp, eager bark of a dog.  Then at length
distinguishable sounds faded and there was only the deep, somnolent
peace of the southern night, with the scent of the roses wreathing the
garden with their intense, mystical odour--only the faint stirring of
little leaves playing hide-and-seek with their shadows, and the thin,
fairy tone-carpet woven by the myriad looms of night insects for near
whispers to tread on.

Since that homeward ride she had had no time to ponder upon the event
of the day.  At dinner the trial had been touched upon but casually.
Now that she was alone, however, it had rushed uppermost in her
thought.  It was not that Harry Sevier had lost the verdict: but his
speech had seemed to her, in the tension of the crisis, with a man's
honour and liberty at stake, inconsequential and almost flippant.  And
in the measure of her disappointment she had realised anew the depth of
her regard for him.  Again and again she pictured the scene in the
courtroom but each time her thought returned upon itself, baffled and
puzzled.

At length, with a long breath that was almost a sigh, she stirred, and
rising, passed into the library where the Judge sat in the arm-chair by
his reading lamp.  "You're a disgraceful night-owl," she said, "and I
refuse to keep you in countenance any longer."

He smiled at her.  "That's right, Sorrel-Top!  It's time for
beauty-sleep if you and Nancy are off to ride in the morning.  Just
give me my eye-shade, will you, before you go?"

She brought the green crescent and snapped it on his forehead.  "There!
You haven't told me how you like my dress to-night.  It's a new one."

He looked.  "It's beautiful."

She turned about before him.  "I do choose well sometimes, don't I?"

"You do everything well, my dear."  In his tone now was a quaint and
curious humility which always touched her when she discerned
it--something of utter fondness and dependance--and she smoothed his
iron-grey hair, one of her characteristic endearments, as she kissed
him good night.

Upstairs Echo opened the door of her room softly.  It was hung in
blue--that shade which one sees in a Gainsborough ribbon, a Romney sash
or a Reynolds sky--and its furniture was of simple white, with large
pink dahlias trailing over the chintz window-curtains and
chair-cushions.  In the dim night-light the triple mirror of the
dresser reflected the carven four-post bed, in one of whose pillows
Nancy's dark head was already buried.

"Is that you, Echo?"

"Yes, it's I.  Were you asleep already?"

"Almost," yawned Nancy.  "I _shall_ be in two shakes of a lamb's tail.
Has Chilly come home yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Do you think he's really at the club, Echo?"

"Of course I do."

"Men are so queer!" sighed Nancy, drowsily.  "We had such a lovely
evening--all except Chilly's not being there."

Echo slipped off her gown and drew out the pins from her hair, letting
it fall in a shimmering cloud to her waist.  Then in the moon-light she
drew a deep chair before the open window and began to brush out that
wonderful mass of stirring gold that curled and waved about her bare,
round shoulders.  Below her the garden lay, a mass of olive shadows,
wound in cloudy golds and misty greens, sprinkled with moon-dust and
drenched with the dizzying scent of roses and honeysuckle.  All was
lapped in the utter quiet of the night--only the swift wing of a
night-bird shook the darker clump of ivy that marked the sun-dial.  A
long time she sat there, the brush parting and smoothing the bronze
mesh with long sweeping movements, gazing into the whisper-haunted
gloom and listening to the measured breathing of the girl behind her
that seemed to form a rhythmical current for her own thoughts.

All at once in the hush there came the clashing of the gate at the foot
of the drive and jovial "good-byes," mingled with a hilarious voice
asseverating that its owner had had "the time of his young life."

She bit her lip.  "It's Chilly!" she whispered, with a frowning look
over her shoulder.

She listened intently.  There was the crunch of an uncertain step on
the gravel, the sound of a stumble from the porch--then the slamming of
the front door.

The dulled sound reverberated through the old house.  It roused Nancy
and she sat upright in the drift of silken coverlets, her eyes heavy
with sleep.  "Is it Chilly?"

"Yes.  He has just come in."

"Is he--?"

"I'm afraid so, dear."

The younger girl caught her breath.  "Oh, I hope your father has gone
to bed.  He's so hard on him!"

Echo turned.  "How can he be otherwise?" she said, sadly.  "It's so
often and often it happens, nowadays.  Won't you try and influence him?
He cares for you, darling!"

Nancy's hands were clasped tight about her knees.  She stirred
uneasily.  "How can I, Echo?  A boy has to have a little bit of a good
time once in awhile.  I wouldn't want him to be a molly-coddle!  He
won't be any the worse for it when he gets older and settled down."

"The worse for it!"  The words fell sadly.  "Don't you think he is the
worse for it already?  He's making no progress with his law-study and
he's been two years out of college, now.  There's nothing to blame but
his drinking--and the company he keeps.  What will be the end of it?
Oh, Nancy, you have a responsibility.  Every woman has with some one
man.  If women only wouldn't countenance it as they do!"

"But, Echo--you talk as if Chilly was--as if you thought he was doing
something disgraceful.  Why, he's a gentleman; he _couldn't_ be
anything but that, no matter what he did!"

Echo came to the bed and sat down beside the other.  In her filmy
night-gown, wound in the mist of her loosened gold shadowed hair she
looked like some ethereal thing in the moonlight.

"Ah, that's just what so many say!  That a gentleman is a gentleman
whether he is drunk or sober!  It's not so with other things.  Is a
gentleman a gentleman whether he lies, or cheats at cards, or not?
Isn't there to be any standard, really?  Don't you see that there never
will be any penalty--as far as drinking is concerned--until women
_make_ it?  Listen, Nancy.  The year I came out, I went to a dance--my
first big one.  There was a boy there who followed me about all over
the floor.  He wanted me to dance with him, and he was--he could hardly
walk.  At first I was frightened, but at last I grew angry.  I asked a
lady why he was not asked to leave the floor.  She seemed quite
astonished and indignant.  'But,' she said, 'don't you know who he
_is_?  That's the son of General Moultrie!'  It was Cale Moultrie.  You
know what became of him, don't you?"

"Yes."  Nancy's voice was muffled.  "But Chilly--"

"Oh, my dear, there was a time when Cale drank no more than the others,
and everybody liked him--as they do Chilly.  It's coming to be the same
with him, I'm afraid.  There's no penalty for him yet because he's
Chisholm Allen--because he's father's son!"

She stopped, caught by the sound of a sob.  In another moment her arms
were around the frail little body and the flower-like face was pressed
hard against her breast.

"I don't care if he _is_ d-d-dissipated," said Nancy passionately.
"I'd rather have him come to me d-d-drunk than any other man sober!
He's just Ch-Ch-Chilly, all the same!"




CHAPTER V

THE UNLAID GHOST

On the ground floor of the old house all was silent save in the
dining-room, where a single electric bulb threw into garish relief the
dismantled table with a bowl of fern glowing like a fountain of
emeralds against the dark wood.  It lighted the Chippendale sideboard,
before which Chisholm Allen confronted old Nelson, the butler.  A
cut-glass decanter of sherry was in one hand; the other was alternately
fumbling uncertainly with the stopper and pushing back the persuasive
fingers of the aged negro.  His straw hat was tipped awry, his face was
flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright.  He was laughing immoderately.

"You old black stick-in-the-mud!" he said.  "What's the matter with
you?  Think _you_ own that decanter, eh?  Well, you don't, not by a
long shot.  _I_ do--Chris'mas present from the Duchess.  Hope to die if
it wasn't.  Leggo, you virtuous old chicken-thief, and give me a
tumbler!"

"Now, Marse Chilly!"  The low voice was deprecating and appealing, and
there was love in it too--the deep, changeless affection of the
old-time negro for his white master.  "Yo' _knows_ yo' don' want no mo'
dat ar.  Yo' done had er plenty at dat ole club down town.  Ef yo' tuck
away any mo' now, yo' gwine have er haid lak er rainbar'l on yo'
shouldahs in dee mawnin'!  Yo' _knows_ yo' is!"

Chilly's hand dragged at the black detaining fingers.  "What do _you_
know about heads?  Take your fool hands away, I tell you!  I'm only
going to take a couple of swallows."

"_Ah_ knows dem ar swallers," pleaded the old man.  "Yo' go erlong tuh
baid.  Hit's long pas' midnight.  Marse Bev-ly's in dee lib'ry."

"Oh bother!" said Chilly irreverently.  "He's gone to bye-bye long ago.
Shut your face or you'll wake him up."

"Fo' dee _Lawd_, Marse Chilly!" stuttered the old man.  "Ah heahs him
comin' _now_!  Ah sho' does!"

"You can't bamboozle me!" laughed Chilly.  "Old Huckleberry's been
snoozing this hour!  If he does come, you and I'll drink his health.
Eh?  Wonder what he'd say!"

He was not to be left in doubt, for at the moment the hall-door opened.
His father stood on the threshold.  He was dressed and the green
eyeshade was on his forehead.

"We will dispense," he said in a tone of quiet hardness, "with a
ceremony which, however filial, is somewhat ill-timed.  Nelson, I think
you needn't wait up any longer."

"Yas, Marse Bev'ly.  Yas, suh."  The old man went to the door,
hesitated and came back.  "Is yo' sho' yo' don' want nothin' else,
Marse Bev'ly?"

"Nothing further, Nelson."

"Yas, suh.  Good night, Marse Bev'ly.  Good night, Marse Chilly."  This
time he went out, closing the door behind him with exaggerated caution.

"Come now, Judge," said his son, still mirthfully.  "There's no masonic
funeral going on in the bungalow, is there?  Can't one have a harmless
night-cap without being excommunicated?"

His father looked at him from under the green shade with gloomy
disapproval.  The address did not tend to mend matters; his son was
wont to reserve the judicial title for moods of especial mellowness
such as to-night's.  He noted the flushed face and sparkling eyes, the
general air of goodnatured recklessness that so clearly spoke the
nature of the other's evening's pleasure.

"We'll discuss that to-morrow."  He crossed to the wall and laid his
hand on the electric switch.  "Good night."

Chisholm still smiled without apparent resentment.  "I guess you
weren't ever as young as I am, Judge, anyway.  You seem to think I'm a
rotten bad lot just because I like to take a glass now and then and go
out with the boys.  You drink _your_ mint-julep all right enough.  And
I'll bet whoever you had to dinner to-night took as much as I've had
under my vest.  The only difference is _I_ haven't had any dinner.  It
does make a difference, I assure you."

His father's hand was still extended to the wall.  "I said good night,
Chisholm."

Chilly shrugged his shoulders.  "Oh, what's the use?" he said
listlessly, and went unsteadily out by the rear door.

The Judge snapped off the switch, and putting out the light in the
library, ascended the stair.  The hard look had deepened on his face.
As he gazed at that nonchalant epitome of ribaldry he had thought of
other men who had so often been grouped about the table in that
room--men of tempered habit, of standing and achievement.  His own son
had contempt for such company.  It bored him.  He preferred to "go out
with the boys" and to come home in the small hours--as he had to-night.
So he was thinking as he entered the room above.  There he stopped in
surprise, for across the threshold stood his wife.  She was in her
night-gown, over which she had thrown a robe of pale crepe with lace at
the neck and wrists.  Her face showed a heightened colour and her lips
were trembling.  He drew forward a chair.

"I thought you were asleep long ago," he said.

She declined the seat with a gesture.  "I heard your voices.  What did
you say to Chilly?"

"I said 'Good night,'" he answered heavily.  "That was about all."

Her lip curled.  The glance she gave him was critically cold.  When she
married Beverly Allen she had loved him--in so far as she had been
capable of loving.  To her marriage had meant the assumption of woman's
predestined place in the social fabric, the inevitable change of habit
which time brings to all, with its widened orbit and opportunities.
She had been drawn to him by every instinct of selection which took
count of name, standing, worldly endowment and mental equipment; but
there had been behind it no throb of maidenly impulse, no thrill of the
great current that feeds the romance of the world.  The one point at
which life for her caught and focused had been the son, whose
misconduct stood so sharply out against the spotless Allen name.  He
was her one weakness, her love for him an unreasoning passion that had
swayed her from his birth.  To her his transgressions showed as venial,
his delinquencies as but the forgivable errors of youth.  The few
instances in which he had been openly called to task by his father had
been sharpened in the latter's memory by her resentment.  But on none
of these occasions had her husband seen her so moved as now.  He did
not know that for many minutes she had stood on the dark landing
listening to the murmurous voices, and that now she resented what
seemed to her a deliberate evasion.  She spoke with slow, even point:

"As a monologist Chilly is a distinct surprise.  Was he saying 'good
night' also?"

Under the unaccustomed anger of her voice the Judge's pale face
flushed.  He took off the eyeshade and set it on the table, as he
replied evenly:

"Chilly is not himself to-night, Charlotte.  Does it matter
particularly what he said?"

Beneath his voice now there was a kind of subterranean compassion, a
note almost of entreaty, as though in this trouble that touched them
both he could have wished to comfort her, if, indeed, she had made that
possible.

She made an involuntary movement--not a sign that a chord had been
touched, but rather a mark of agitation.  Chilly was the one subject
upon which she could not bring to bear the tempered reason which
otherwise marshalled her even life.  It seemed to her now that she was
being thrust aside, in the interest of some new plan of discipline and
coertion.  She turned swiftly on her husband.

"I suppose you think it should make no difference to me!"  Her eyes
blazed.  "You are so sure you understand Chilly!  You--his father--have
you ever really known him all his life?  Does he ever come to you when
he is in trouble or needs advice?"

Her voice held a bitter sarcasm and again the flush swept up the
Judge's pale face.  But his voice was emotionless as he said, "Chilly
never felt the need of advice from any one.  He goes his own sweet way."

"That is just it!" she said.  "You set yourself so far above him.  You
have such a contempt for his pleasures and so thoroughly despise the
company he keeps.  Suppose he has a taste for liquor.  He is still a
gentleman, I believe.  But you, with your solemn rectitude and your
touch-me-not self-righteousness--you would drive him to the very people
and places he ought to keep away from!"

He stared at her.  "I have never regarded my repugnance to his habits
as inducing him to further excesses," he said slowly.  "Nor have I set
myself up as preacher.  Perhaps I have never understood him as--you do.
I only know that his ways are not my ways.  He has had every advantage
that education and environment can confer.  He is older than I was when
I began practice.  But what is he making of his life?  He thinks of
nothing but playing fast and loose at country-houses and loafing at the
club and acting the fop and the fool generally!"

Her shaking hand was plucking at the lace at her throat.  His every
word had been a live coal laid to her resentment.  "Is that the worst
you can say of him?" she asked.  "Can't you call him sot or black-leg?"

"Not yet."  He was feeling now a dull anger at her scorn, at her
persistent disapproval.  The throb of sympathy he had first felt had
been frozen by her icy reproach.  "There are other things I wish to be
able to say of my son.  I want him to be more than a decorative
philanderer.  I want him to be a man--one to whom men may look for
manliness, and women for honour!"

She had grown pale to the lips.  "'And women for honour!'" she
repeated.  "As _I_ looked to--_you_!"

He had flung out his arm with a characteristic gesture, but at her last
words it suddenly stiffened and remained, as if it had been frozen in
the air.  Slowly it dropped at his side as he stared at her with ashen
face--a look of shocked and disconcerted inquiry.  For the exclamation,
as at the swift slash of a blade, had torn away a veil, woven of time
and habit, that covered an old wound.  For twenty years by tacit
consent this hidden thing of the past had never been acknowledged by
any word or deed between them.  Now a single sentence had laid it bare,
quick and quivering and mutually confessed.  They had been married
twenty-two years, and if in that early period he had discerned any lack
in her, he had given her no reproaches.  On her part, she had fulfilled
what she esteemed her whole duty, and in her own mind stood blameless.
And he had had his profession.  But in the end starved nature had
reasserted itself.  There had come to him a passion, swift and terrible
while it lasted, to which he had surrendered wholly--till death swept
it from him.  The gall and wormwood had been sweetened then by the
birth, in merciful coincidence with that loss, of his twin children.
He had thought the episode buried forever from sight and hearing, but a
later chance had discovered it to his wife, and in her own
immaculateness she had been able neither to forget nor to forgive.  It
had made no difference in her life before their world.  Cold and
perfect and correct, she had held her way, but from the day when she
had faced him with his secret in her hand, their hearts had been
strangers to one another.  He had climbed high and she had risen with
him.  And in twenty years no word had fallen from her lips to open that
old tomb--till to-night when the heavy doors swung ajar at the echo of
that one exclamation.

"As _I_ looked to--_you_!"  There it was--the old ghost, called up to
haunt his present as it had waylaid his past.  His hand fumbled for the
discarded eye-shade and adjusted it as he slowly said:

"I have never counted myself a pattern, Charlotte--least of all for my
own son."

She caught the note of pain and weariness now in his voice, and
something new and unaccustomed stirred for one brief moment in her
heart.  She had struck harder than she had intended.  But she had lost
control at a critical moment and old bitterness, that had never been
tinctured with the sweetness of charity and forgiveness, had sharpened
her tongue.  Now his shocked white face smote her with a sense of
self-reproach whose very strangeness threw her momentarily off her
poise.  For a fleeting second words trembled on her tongue that might
have dissolved the icy barrier between them.  But the golden second
passed.

"That is generous," she said with a distant laugh.

"No doubt Chilly will profit by experience, if not by precept.  Shall
you be at court to-morrow?"

"Yes," he answered.  "I have a hearing."

"You will prefer the horses, then," she said, turning to the door.  "I
will take the electric for my shopping.  Good night."

He opened the door for her.  "Good night," he said.




CHAPTER VI

THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT

In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand
at his lips, as though he tasted blood.  The summer night outside was
very still.  The curtain before one of the windows swayed gently in the
air and from the acacia trees on the lawn he could hear the sleepy
twitter of an oriole.  He turned off the light and went into the hall.
There at one side stood the white, panelled door of his wife's room.
It was shut.  It came to him that it stood for a perfect symbol of that
cold immaculateness of hers which had so long denied him the living
bread of sympathy.  She could forgive anything in her son, but nothing
in her husband.  For twenty long years they two might have dwelt at
opposite ends of the Milky Way, and it seemed to him suddenly
monstrous, whatever the cause, whosesoever the fault, that they, being
man and wife, should yet be so far apart.

He went slowly down the stair again, his hand, shaking a little,
slipping along the polished banister.  The dim night-light made the
lower hall a place of ghostly shadows.  He re-entered the library,
moved to the table and turned on the reading-lamp.  Then, lifting it to
the limit of its silken cord, he threw the electric glow upon the
canvas that hung above the mantel, studying it intently.

"Mine!" he muttered, with a sort of fierce satisfaction.  "Mine, every
inch--mine, not Charlotte's!  My blood gave you that curve of brow and
those full lips and that deep, dark blue of eye--they are of my side,
not of hers!  You, at least belong to me!"

He returned the lamp to its place, and turning, cast his glance at the
little Italian desk in the corner.  His lips trembled.  At that desk
she had sat--the woman knowledge of whom had sharpened the sword of his
wife's never-dying disdain.  The woman who had come into his life too
late!  He thought of their meetings, few enough, indeed.  How often he
had wondered how life would have turned for him, if at the end she had
listened to his desperate pleading, and gone with him along that
alluring way that had drawn him like an opal path among Italian
asphodels, flinging to the winds social standing, reputation, career,
friends, honour, all!  If she had said "yes" to that wild letter he had
sent her--the one to which she had vouchsafed no reply--which might
have been written in his very heart's blood!

He looked again at the painted portrait of Echo, in her splendid youth
and clean heritage: the answer was there.

He sat down before the little desk, stretched his arms upon it and
bowed his head upon them.  "You were right, Eleanor," he sighed.  "You
were right.  But somehow it's been so long!"

He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up.  There before
him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper--a page closely written over
in twirly, dim writing.  He lifted it up and held it to the light, his
nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead
pansy's ghost--


No--no--no!  Why did you write it?  Why did you put it into words?  For
now I must keep it always.  I cannot destroy it.  You _knew_ I would
not--_could_ not---let you do what you beg me to!  Never, never!  I am
not so mad.  Nor are you, really.  It is not your best self speaking in
this letter.  Sometime--


His gaze became fixed.  He gave a hoarse cry--a mist was before his
eyes.  He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet--it was dated
twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar!  He laid the
leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve
throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though
days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it:


Sometime you will thank me--will think of this only as a ghastly
indiscretion from which you were caught away in time.  We do not make
the world we live in, and it is a thousand times stronger than we are.
No, if we play the game we must stick to the rules.  To think of
overstepping that boundary, in such a desperate fashion, gives my
fastidious sense a strange recoil--something like that curious shame
and confusion that associates itself with a dream in which one finds
one's-self scantily clad in the midst of wondering strangers!  No--no!
I do not think I shall send this letter--but perhaps I may at the end.
For I am going away.  I sail to-morrow.  Shall I see you
again--ever--ever?  What will you think--


That was all.  It broke off abruptly as though the writer had laid it
aside, never to be finished.

In the silent library the Judge looked at that mute witness as at one
risen from the dead.  Twenty years of absence and silence--twenty years
out of his ken, save to the thriving memory!  For how long the hand
that had penned those lines had been dust, yet the poor symbols of ink
and paper persisted to confront him now!  How had the sheet come to be
on that desk that she had bequeathed him?  It had not lain there a
moment before.

He brought the lamp and examined the desk attentively, pulling out
every tiny drawer, sounding each carved partition, twisting and tugging
at every projecting portion of the ornamentation.  With a thin, metal
paper-knife he explored each warp and crevice.  But his search was
fruitless.  If the leaf had slipped from some crack--loosened, perhaps,
by the fall of the brass bowl upon it that day--the old desk kept its
secret.

A strange feeling stole over him, the feeling of mystery that comes to
one with some sudden apposition of incident that thrills with a sense
of an overpowering meaning in a circumstance in itself banal and
trivial.  Something of her proud and passionate spirit she had etched
into those lines.  Might it be that spirit, somewhere in the great
void, reached out to him through this silent witness--to say that love
does not wholly die?

He gently spoke her name.  "Eleanor!  You forgave me for writing--that.
If you hadn't you wouldn't have left me this desk when you--died, away
over there in Florence!  So I've got your letter at last."

He sighed again and groping for his big chair, sat down, with the sheet
of paper spread out upon his knee.


On the upper floor Mrs. Allen tapped lightly on Chilly's door and when
there was no answer, opened it softly and entered.  At the whisper of
his name he started up in bed.

"Duchess!" he exclaimed.

The pet name, as always, touched her.  It was a perennial tribute to
that stateliness and dignity which she had made her own.  She came and
sat down on the edge of the bed and he caught her hand and held it to
his lips.  "You shouldn't have come," he chided.  "You'll take cold."

"I heard your father talking to you," she whispered.  "You--you know
what he dislikes so.  Why can you not be--discreet?"

Chilly moved uneasily: "Oh, I know," he said.  "But I can't always be
giving an imitation of a quaker meeting!  I'm not a child."

"You must not anger him," she said.  "I--for my sake, I wish you would
be more careful."

He patted her hand.  "All right, Duchess!  I'll mind my p's and q's.
But you must go back to bed now.  Don't you worry about me."

She bent down and kissed him on the forehead before she glided from the
room.




CHAPTER VII

ARROWS OF DESIRE

"Here is the new rose," said Echo.  "Its name is the Laurant Carle."

Cameron Craig looked--at her, not at the blossom.  She was in simple
white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental,
tuned to the wonder and passion of living, her slim figure outlined
against the dark green shrubbery and her face and gold-bronze hair
touched with the slanting sunlight, she seemed herself some great,
rare, golden flower in a silver sheath.  Lines he had somewhere read
sprang into his mind:

  "Bring me my bow of burning gold,
  Bring me my arrows of desire,"

and, contained man that he was, he caught his breath at the sudden leap
in him of the thing that had been covered and hidden there so long,
something fine and keen as flame, that set his habitually cool blood
beating under his eyelids.

"It was not the rose," he said.  "I had another reason in asking you to
come here."

"Yes?"  Her voice was evenly inquiring.

"It was to ask you if you will marry me."

She took a quick step backward; a look of amaze had sprung to her face.
"I?" she exclaimed.  "You want me to--_marry_ you?"

"Yes.  Is there anything strange in that?"

She looked away.  In all her thoughts of the man before her there had
not lurked this possibility.  She had been bred among youth who,
whatever their other vices, maintained a chivalric ideal of womankind
which excluded fast-and-loose conduct; and the whispers that clung
about Cameron Craig--set, as they were, over against his force and
undeniably brilliant attainments--had lent her opinion of him a certain
cold contempt.  And now here he was--he of all men!--saying this to
her!  And it was no hasty impulse: she read that in the steady,
confident eyes, the hard, heavy jaw, the steadfast, deep-lined face.

She felt his waiting gaze.  "No," she answered, slowly.  "Perhaps it is
not strange.  It is only that the unexpected seems so."  She looked at
him curiously.  "Why did you ask me--to-day?"

"The opportunity came," he said.  "It must have, sooner or later."

"So you have intended for some time to say this to me?"

"Since I first met you, a year ago," he answered.  "You have two things
that I want--as I have their complements."

She considered this a moment.  "Forgive me," she said then, "but I am a
very curious person--as well, it seems, as a very blind one.  Would you
mind telling me what are those two qualities that you imagine I
possess, which you value so highly?"

"Breeding, first," he replied, "and all that it implies.  You represent
a stock."

She nodded gravely.  "And the other desideratum?"

"Beauty.  You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

"And--the complements of these things, that you possess?"

"Money," he answered.  "And the power it gives--the accessories which a
woman like you must have if she would really live.  I think you don't
doubt that my wife shall have these things."

She shook her head.  "Not in the least.  Indeed, I am sure she will.
But you see, Mr. Craig, I happen to be not at all the sort of person
you think I am--the kind you wish to marry."

"I'll risk that!" he flung her.

"The proof is that you ask me--as you have.  The things you have to
offer seem overwhelmingly attractive to you, no doubt, but I'm afraid
they mean much less to me."  He could not see the look that was in her
face now, for her head was turned away.  "I have no longing for money.
I could be contented in a mountain lean-to, with morning-glories
instead of an orchid conservatory.  I could cook my own meals on a
gas-stove and live in one room over a hardware store--with the man I
loved.  I don't care particularly for what you call 'place' either.  I
could be happy enough on a prairie--with the man I loved.  But love
must be there, Mr. Craig."

"Do you doubt my love for you?" he asked.

"You had not cited it," she rejoined, calmly.  "You spoke of money
first--"

"Because I have lived long enough to know that it is the paramount
requisite in most women's eyes."

"Your estimate of me by the mass was flattering," she said with gentle
satire.  "Have you been so busy making this wonderful money of yours
that you think it can take the place of everything?"

He made an abrupt, almost angered, gesture.  "Surely you know money
means--has meant--nothing to me!" he exclaimed.  "I am rich, yes.  I
dare say I could buy and sell almost any one you know.  But it was
never the main thing.  It was _winning_ that counted.  It was the game,
and money was only the counters.  I played to win and I have won.  And
wealth was a stepping-stone to other things."

His voice had subtly altered and he drew closer to her where she stood,
moveless and straight against the dark foliage, her gaze averted.
"Then--I met you!  I have known many women, but they have been nothing,
less than nothing, to me!  Business has been the only thing that really
counted.  But since I met you, the whole world has been changing for
me.  Even my work isn't the main thing to me any more.  The main thing
is _you_!"

She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the
unexpected--touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience.  His voice
was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known.
There was passion in it.  She saw his big hand tremble.

"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted
you!  You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you
has coloured all I have thought and done!  If this is love, then I love
you--Echo, Echo!"

She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips.  "Stop!" she said.
"The love you talk of must be mutual.  I do not--care for you in that
way.  I never could!"

"That makes no difference to me!" he protested.  "I know what I want--I
always have.  And I want you."

"No," she said.  "It is not the real _me_ that you want, but we can
pass that by.  The important fact is that you have offered your last
price and the bid is declined."

He looked at her with a sudden flash in his eyes.  "Do I deserve that?"
He had grown pale to the lips.

"Yes, you do.  I have told you that I should never love you.  Yet that
means less than nothing to you.  You have apparently not considered my
possible love as a requisite in the case.  It is 'breeding' you want,
and beauty--and for that you make your offer.  You propose purchase,
not exchange, Mr. Craig.  Well, I am not for sale!"

He flushed to his hair a dark, heavy red.  He appeared to be
controlling himself by a fierce effort.  "Don't answer me now," he
said.  "Let me speak to you again later."

"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.  You will please
consider it final."

[Illustration: "I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.
You will please consider it final"]

A whirl of what seemed almost rage shook him; with a single stride he
reached her and seized both her hands.  "Is there--another man?"  There
was what startled her now in the harsh, hard voice.

She stiffened.  "Well," she said, "--and if there is?"

At the chill quiet of her voice all the vicious strength and
intolerance of the man blazed out.  "You are right!" he said savagely.
"It could make no difference to me!  I will not take your answer--do
you understand?  In time you will give me a different one.  I have
waited for other things and I have had them in the end.  I can wait for
you!"

He released her hands--so violently that she fell back a step.  Then,
while she stood regarding him in shocked and indignant amaze, summoning
all her forces to meet this fury that had both astonished and repelled
her, his face swiftly changed.  The flush of anger ebbed, the flash
died in his eyes.

Once again his accustomed self, with the steady, confident eyes and
swing of shoulder, he drew aside to let her pass and followed her along
the box-bordered path to the piazza.


As they entered the blue-parlour, a lady very smart in black-and-white,
and a sailor-hat whose girlish brim youthened her mature beauty, rose
from her seat with Mrs. Allen and Nancy Langham, Echo's house-guest, a
slight, glowing girl of nineteen, with eyes like marigolds in shade.

"Well, Echo," she said, "I thought you never _would_ appear.  I just
ran in to remind you that you and Nancy promised to come to my dinner
to-night at the 'Farm.'  I've asked some of the youngsters out for a
little dance afterward."  She smiled a brilliant recognition to the
heavy figure behind her.

"Mr. Craig!" she exclaimed.  "So you are in town!  How nice it would be
of you to come too.  Or do you find country-club gaieties too stale and
unprofitable?"

He bowed over her hand.  "My dear Mrs. Spottiswoode!" he said.  "This
is my lucky day!  I shall be more than delighted!"




CHAPTER VIII

THE THRUST

The "Farm," as the Country-Club was popularly known to its habitues,
was a long, three-storied structure of red brick on the selvedge of the
southern suburb, set in a grove of maple trees facing a lake whose
still depths were stirred by budding water-lilies, like the breasts of
young girls.  With its golf-links, and tennis-courts and its ball-room
which formed an L at one side, its white, balustraded verandahs, it was
the favoured resort of both the frivolous and athletic; its monthly
dances were the gayest of the season's informal functions and on
Saturday evenings its row of little dining-rooms, that looked out on a
gentle slope of shrubbery and gravelled walks pricked out with paper
lanterns, were favourite resorts for small dinner-parties.

Mrs. Spottiswoode's dinners were apt to have a pleasurable sprinkling
of youth and sobriety and to-night the dozen of the younger set found
sufficient foil in the fashionable rector of St. Andrews in clerical
dress relieved only by the tiny amethyst cross that swung upon his
waistcoat--in Senator Peyton, party-whip at Washington and one of the
state's distinguished citizens, with piercing sword-grey eyes under
brows as black as midnight--and finally in Cameron Craig.

As Echo Allen had said to her father, the latter was not "one of them."
The phrase to her had been an instinctive expression of that subtle
sense of caste that had been born in her, springing from long lines of
gentle ancestors that linked back beyond the days of the Old Dominion.
But the distinction lay deep in the mental formula of the man: it was
not to be perceived in externals.  To-night, in his faultless
evening-dress, with his keen, strong face and assured manner, he had an
air even of distinction that well became him, and the instant's painful
embarrassment that Echo felt as her hand touched his in their first
greeting yielded quickly to an unwilling admiration of his poise and
control.  If that flare of passion in the garden had left its traces,
they had been successfully covered.  He was once more the Cameron Craig
she had known--till yesterday.

But beneath that unruffled exterior Craig's every pulse was in tumult.
At table he found himself opposite Echo.  The decorations were red
roses and in a ruby gown with a single rose in the coil of her tawny
hair, she seemed to him an inherent part of the scheme, a ruby pendent
to the rich, shimmering setting.  There had been many women to whom he
had been passingly attracted--his tastes had been catholic enough in
that regard!  But he had never seen one whom he had wished to marry.
He had spoken truly when he said that the women he had known had really
meant nothing to him.  His licenses had been but incidents after all.
They had not ministered to the mental side of his nature, whereas this
passion had taken swift and complete possession.  As he saw her now,
her cheeks flushing to the glow of the candles and her eyes like softly
lighted sapphires, he felt open wide within him an abyss that thronged
thick with distempered imaginings.  There was another man!  She had not
denied it.  And with the thought there grew in him a slow, cold hatred
and determination.

Yet his face, as Echo glanced across the roses, betrayed no sign of
disquiet.  He was apparently listening amusedly to the small-talk of
his partner, Nancy Langham, in a gown of pale gauze that made her look
like a small, eager tiger-lily caught in a hampering cloud.  In the
interstices of conversation Echo could catch whiffs of her laughing
nonsense:

"Isn't Dr. Custis quite _wickedly_ handsome for a rector!  I've been
instructed _not_ to ask him if he is related to Martha Washington.  The
man across from Mrs. Spottiswoode is Richard Brent, he is 'The Herald,'
and a power in the community, I believe.  Our hostess is wearing the
new wave; it costs a lot, but they say it's guaranteed to last six
months.  And to think," she sighed, "that Melissa, my maid, spends a
dollar a week trying to have her wool ironed _straight_!  The man with
the goatee, who looks so Spanishy, is Mr. Horace Leighton, the New York
artist who is doing the mural paintings for the new City Hall here."

"So there isn't any one here who isn't anybody!" Craig observed.

"Only me," she said.  "The reason I'm asked is because I'm frivolous.
I'm supposed to offset the feast of reason with bubbles and froth."

"At any rate," remarked the senator, "seriousness is not to fall in
arrears.  Down at the other end they have actually got to politics."

Echo's glance followed his.  Their hostess was holding a glass of wine
between her eye and the candle-light, which splashed a bright crimson
ray on her pretty face.  It was the rector who was speaking:

"As for myself, I'm afraid I'm a friend to all the old, hackneyed
arguments.  'If meat maketh my brother to offend,' you know."  He
pointed to his wine-glass, which, with the arrival of the soup, he had
turned upside-down.  "You see I am consistent."

"Politics?" queried Echo.  "It seems to be only teetotalism."

"Ah," the senator answered, "but it's coming to be the same thing
nowadays."

"One understands the individual objection on moral grounds," said Mrs.
Spottiswoode.  "That's a matter of personal belief and conscience.  And
the Church must be above criticism--must take the sterner course.  But
for those of us who don't think it wrong, the other arguments seem
so--so local.  I suppose drinking does keep the negroes from doing as
much work as they might, but it's hard on the rest of us to have to cut
our cloth by the farmer's pattern!  We here, for example, at this
table, are to go without our sauterne because he has trouble in getting
in his tobacco."

"Exactly," agreed the churchman.  "The greatest good of the greatest
number.  And isn't that true democracy, after all?  But of course the
agricultural problem is the least of it--there are the figures of
poverty and crime.  The two are twin-brothers, of course.  And drink is
the father of them both.  Will, character, determination--a man with
these may overcome the habit.  But these are just the qualities that
men in the mass lack.  When a weak man falls our system keeps him down.
I once heard Thomas Malcolm--every one here knows of him and his work,
I presume--say that for the average drunkard to reform with a saloon on
every corner is about as easy as to hoist one's-self out of hell by
one's boot-straps.  I'm inclined to think he is right.  And I never saw
a drunkard yet--a real Simon-pure drunkard, I mean; not a mere
sophomoric tippler--who wouldn't jump at the chance to reform if he
could.  But he has no more chance of winning out now than a gambler
against loaded dice."  He paused, with a little gesture.  "But then,"
he added, "the modern political movement for prohibition has made every
one familiar with the basic arguments."

Treadwell, spruce young corporation attorney and cotillon leader,
looked up interestedly from the other end of the table; the hostess's
fan had begun to flutter--a sign of agitation.  For Cameron Craig's
affiliations with the great Trust were well-known, though presumably
not to the clergyman, who had met him for the first time that evening.
Craig, however, seemed quite unconscious of personal implications.

"Do you seriously think, sir," he asked, with the faintest trace of
irony, "that the statistics of crime would be materially lowered in
your state if it went 'dry' next year?"

"I do," replied the rector with emphasis.  "And not only lowered.  They
would be practically wiped out.  There wouldn't be enough left to
constitute an item in the appropriation for public printing."

"Naturally, however," Craig observed, "as the state has always been
'wet,' exact data is lacking to assist one's speculations."

"On the contrary," said the other.  "Every jail furnishes them.  I
think," he went on, turning now to Treadwell, "that it is the
experience of every criminal lawyer that liquor, in some phase or
other, has been back of the larger proportion of cases he is called on
to defend."

The young man nodded.  "I never had any experience in criminal cases,"
he said, "but I should think you were not far wrong.  What do you say,
Brent?"

"I agree with you," the journalist answered, "but my view of course is
a superficial one.  It is a pity that Harry Sevier isn't here; we
should have got a valuable opinion."

"You may be gratified then," said the hostess.  "Though Mr. Sevier
couldn't come to dinner, he will be here for the dancing."

The senator spoke.  "Sevier!  I heard him in court yesterday."

"So did I," commented Nancy, aside.  "I gave up an auction-bridge for
it, and I wish I hadn't.  It wasn't exciting at all."

Mrs. Spottiswoode looked relief--at last the talk had shifted to safe
ground.  "He lost the case, I hear," she said.  "I wonder what was the
matter.  Wasn't he in good form?"

The senator looked thoughtful.  "In one way, yes," he replied
judicially.  "I confess, though, I had rather expected something
different, but just what I scarcely know."

Nancy turned her small, piquant face.  "_I_ know.  We all expected Mr.
Sevier to do what he has done so often--but didn't to-day.  Oh," she
exclaimed almost angrily, "while he was talking along, like a machine,
I could have shaken him!"

"That _would_ have furnished the sensation!" said Treadwell.  "And I
should think it might have had its effect on the jury, too.  Juries
_can_ be intimidated.  I wish you had tried it."

She made a little face at him across the nodding roses, then turned
more earnestly to her partner.  "I don't know anything about court
matters or criminal trials, but from where I sat I could see the man he
was defending.  He looked so hopeless and--scared!  I wanted to stand
up and scream across the room: Can't you _see_?  Look at the poor thing
there!  Make the jury _feel_!  You were thinking the same thing too,
Echo, I could see it in your face."

Echo lifted her eyes.  In the candle-light her cheek held a rising
flush.  She looked across at the rector.  "What do you think, Dr.
Custis?" she asked, evenly.

He responded promptly.  "Perhaps the explanation isn't so far afield.
I presume the man had confessed to him and Sevier knew he was guilty."

Echo was conscious of a wave of relief at an explanation so simple and
credible.  It had never occurred to her to question the accuracy of
other verdicts Harry had won in the past.  Each had seemed to her the
triumph of a just cause over a baleful combination of circumstance, the
brilliant freeing of truth and innocence from entangling error and
maleficent scheming.  But if this man was guilty and Harry had known it
beyond question, what other outcome had been possible?  At the moment
she saw in that even, cold presentation of the court-room only the
conscientious determination of the lawyer, who, as the law prescribed,
stood by his client to demand that justice, if she must exact her
penalty, prove conclusively every jot and tittle of her ground.

Craig's eyes had been regarding her steadily.  With the spreading of
that flush upon her cheeks a covert, laughing allusion that had come to
his ear on the court-house steps on the day of the trial darted to his
mind.  A cool, keen certainty rushed through him.  Sevier!  Fool that
he was not to have thought of him before!  This young _flaneur_--and
drunkard!--this petty trifler with his profession!  Was that white
indignation of the garden, this vivid flush, for _him_?  He leaned
forward, his heavy voice, intense and well modulated, addressed the
clergyman:

"An interesting hypothesis, but the implication seems hardly safe.  A
lawyer's responsibility to his client is a very grave one.  He owes
none toward the commonwealth--the state's attorney takes care of that.
Any less conventional view should appeal to a lawyer, I think, as
dangerous and uncalled-for."

"What do you fancy was responsible for Sevier's method of defence in
this case?" asked the rector.

There was an instant of blank silence.  The conversation had absorbed
the lesser talk and other voices were hushed.  Craig's look was set
upon the long oval damask with its glistening silver and baskets of
brilliant fruit, its leaf thin glasses with languid beads rising in
their liquid amber, its knots of fern and bonbons.  His big fingers
were twisting the stem of a goblet.  When he spoke it was as though he
had not heard the question.

"I attended a trial once," he said, "at a frontier town in the far
southwest, a border community where procedure is very primitive.  The
man was charged with murder.  He was a school-master, I believe, and in
a quarrel with some local bully or other, had killed him.  I was in the
place on some land-business and went to the trial for mere amusement.
The whole neighbourhood was there.  Both men, it appeared, had been in
their cups, and self-defence seemed an adequate plea.  Acquittal was
regarded as fairly certain--the more so as the District Attorney was
the bosom-friend of the accused man, and everybody knew it.  There was
almost no attempt at evidence, which didn't seem surprising under the
circumstances, and the state made the baldest farce of its
cross-examination.  The real interest came after a rather long recess
that preceded the final speeches.  The prisoner's counsel was a young
man with a rough, direct address that caught the people.  He had them
pretty well with him, too, and when he sat down there seemed very
little reason why the jury should even leave the box.  The speech had
been a fairly long one and as it had grown dark, candles had been
brought in and set about--two on the judge's desk and some on the
tables."

Echo repressed a start.  It had come to her suddenly that there was a
significance in what he was saying--a suggestion that a quick
clairvoyant sense told her was principally for her.  In the few words
he had, with apparent unintention, sketched the actual scene in the
court-room of the day before, and while reversing its elements, was
picturing, in unfamiliar guise, its identical situation.  She felt her
face slowly harden, and turned her profile toward him, her hand playing
with a spray of fern beside her plate.

"During the whole speech the District Attorney had sat in his chair,
with his chin in his collar and his eyes closed, never moving.  When
his turn came he didn't rise; in fact, it was clear that he had been
asleep.  A laugh went round and the sheriff put a hand on his shoulder
and shook him.  He got up, looking confused, and while he blinked at
the candles, some one in the audience called out, 'Never mind, old man.
If you can't make a speech, recite a poem.'  It was curious, but the
remark seemed to give him a clue, and he began to recite Hood's _Eugene
Aram_."

Craig paused a moment and sipped from his wine-glass.  All at the table
were leaning forward intently.  Treadwell was frowning at his plate.
No one spoke; only a fork, dropped from Nancy Langham's fingers,
rattled against the cloth.

"It was a strange sight," went on Craig, "and one I have always
remembered.  You must picture the crowded court-room, the gloom, the
flaring candles, and the whole uncanny episode, to realise the effect
that was produced.  The man was by nature a marvellous actor--he would
have made his fortune on any stage.  At first it seemed as if he didn't
know quite where he was, but then the ballad itself gripped him and he
rendered it, acting each line, as I never heard it before or since.  I
had never realised what was in that poem.  Very few there, I suppose,
had ever heard it in their lives, and they listened in a fascinated
silence while he rolled it out to the last line.

  "'Two hard-faced men set out from Lynn,
    Through the rain and heavy mist,
  And Eugene Aram walked between
    With gyves upon his wrist.'"


He paused again.  "Oh, finish!" gasped Nancy Langham.  "I don't like
that story.  What then?"

"When he ended he walked out of the court-room without waiting for the
verdict."

Echo's head turned toward him.  "They found him guilty!" exclaimed Mrs.
Spottiswode.

"Yes."

"And you say the District Attorney was his best friend?" asked the
artist.

"So I was told."

"And yet wanted to convict him?"

Craig shook his head.  "No, I didn't say that."

"Then what," inquired the rector, "do you take it, inspired him to such
an extraordinary action?"

"Oh," said Craig, and as he spoke, for the first time he looked full at
Echo.  "It all came out afterward.  He didn't realise what he was
doing.  He was drunk."


For an instant Echo's breath stopped.  In the unexpected denouement she
had guessed, as at a lightning-flash, Craig's real purpose.  Sharply,
baldly introduced, the tale stood forth intrusive and malicious, an
implied slur upon a man who was not present to refute it.  Her whole
being flooded with fierce resentment, mingled with an angry amaze that
of all there no one else seemed to have caught the insinuation.  To the
rest it had been at most a _gaucherie_, a parallel which, if perhaps
not felicitous, had been without significance and would be readily
forgotten.  Therein lay the added sting, that Craig had so accurately
judged the outcome.  He had guessed how it stood with her and Harry
Sevier, and counting on her keener sensitiveness where the latter was
concerned, had barbed his shaft for her alone!

The next instant, however, the tension broke with every one talking at
once.  From this babble the senator emerged with a negro story about a
trial with "exterminatin' circumstances," which brought a ripple of
laughter, and presently the hostess gave the rising signal.

The room opened upon the ball-room from whose further end already came
the squeak of tuned catgut, and beyond this spread the invitingly cool
verandas, now beginning to fill with filmy gowns that showed pallidly
against the evening dusk, where the bouquet of masculine segars mingled
with the dewed scent of shrubbery.  Here in the increasing numbers,
unobserved as she thought, Echo stepped down onto the cool dark turf
and following one of the little meandering bush-bordered paths, came to
a rustic bench over which a paper lantern threw flickering
rose-coloured shadows.  On this she sat down, struggling to regain her
lost composure and grateful for the sense of quiet and the cool
inspiration of the water, over whose margin the moonbeams danced in
elfish ecstasy.

In another moment, however, the silence was broken.  A step sounded on
the path, and she looked up to see Craig standing before her.




CHAPTER IX

THE TURN OF THE LONG LANE

Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire.  In her resentment it had
seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that
slur upon the man she loved, and she had been aching fiercely to repel
it.

Craig tossed his segar away.  He made no apologies for having followed
her from the piazza.  "May I sit here and talk to you?" he asked.

She remained standing.  "Mr. Craig," she said with quiet emphasis, "I
am glad you have come to me here.  I have something to ask you which I
could not have asked you--there."

He bowed and stood waiting.

"I fancied," she went on, "in certain of your remarks at the table a
lurking innuendo.  It is difficult to reply to such a thing.  You would
make it possible if you would put it in a more direct form."

"Your own observation does not appear to err in directness," he
answered, after a pause.  "I am afraid I must ask you to descend to
plain English."

"In the course of the dinner you told a story."

"Henceforth I shall congratulate myself on my skill as a _raconteur_."
His tone was mildly ironic.

"It seemed to me--and I think I am of average intelligence and not more
fanciful than most--that by that story you intended to convey, an
insinuation against the reputation of a gentleman whom I do not care to
hear maligned."

He looked at her with smouldering eyes.  He was feeling admiration for
her quick, hot southern blood and resentful spirit.  It was part of
that splendid type of womanhood that he had determined to make his own.
And that it was now displayed in defence of the man whose weakness he
despised and whose personality he hated filled him with a dull,
glooming fury.  His lips twisted.  "Maligned?" he repeated, in an
accent that was a question.

"That was my word," she said steadily.

"You appear to attach an extraordinary importance to my tale," he
retorted, with grim sarcasm.

"Do you deny that there _was_ innuendo?"

He smiled.  "I can endure even that suspicion, since it is such a
compliment to my own subtlety.  May I ask, in my turn, in whose
interest you so valorously take up the cudgels?"

"Your story directly followed a reference to Mr. Henry Sevier's
handling of a case in court here.  The unexpected outcome of the trial
in your tale was due to the fact that its chief character, though no
one realised it, was under the influence of liquor.  The implication
seemed obvious--that Mr. Sevier was not himself when he conducted his
defence."

He shrugged his shoulders.  "You are the only one who has drawn such a
conclusion?"

Her pale face blazed.  "Oh, I understand!  You intended the inference
for me alone!"

"Well?" he asked, with aggravating calmness.

"Did you insinuate that, or did you not?"  Her pent-up anger was
tearing now at her self-control.

He laughed, a short, jarring laugh.  He felt an insane desire to seize
that slender, unyielding body in his great arms, to rain kisses on that
vivid, scornful mouth with its short upper lip, and bend or break her
like a sapling to his savage will.  "Suppose I did," he said stonily.
"What then?"

"That was a contemptible act!"  The young voice cut like a whip-lash
and involuntarily Craig's big fists clenched.  "And if I were Mr.
Sevier, I would horsewhip you!"

A sound from behind them fell across the surcharged quiet.  Both turned
astonished faces--Echo's quivering with feeling, Craig's set and
stormy--upon the man whose name had just been spoken.  Neither had
heard his step as he came quickly along the grassy path, nor had Sevier
guessed the situation till those pregnant sentences sent the blood from
his heart.  He had thought the secret of his failure unsuspected.  The
realisation now that one, at least, had guessed the truth had been
instantly swallowed up in the bitter knowledge that it had fallen to
her--the one woman in the world--to defend him, who was undeserving!

Craig regarded him with a veiled smile that was half a sneer.  The
apparition had come at a fateful moment.  Then his glance passed to
Echo.  "May I ask," he said, "whether you have yet cross-examined Mr.
Sevier?"

He bowed and went quickly up the path toward the lighted piazzas.

There ensued a silence in which two minds travelled far.  Echo had sat
down upon the bench, her face averted.  Her anger had faded out and her
heart was hammering at the thought that Harry had heard, in her defence
of him, what was in truth a confession.  Across the aching interval
broke the wanton bubble of a whip-poor-will.

"Echo--" he said in a muffled voice.

She looked up at him in the feathery light.  "You heard--I wish you
hadn't.  Yet I couldn't help it!  That ridiculous slur!  But you can't
possibly imagine that--that any one who knows you--"

He stopped her with an abrupt gesture.  "Wait.  I want to--I must tell
you something."

"No, no!" she protested.  "You shall not!  I need no assurance.  Do you
think that I--"

He shook his head.  But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that
satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have
seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt
for the whisper of malice.  But the look and sneer had flicked him on
the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him.
In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome
there could be no evasion between them.  There must be the truth.  He
was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no
malingerer.

"Thank you," he said, "for that!  Yet what Craig wished you to
believe--was quite true."

She stared at him unbelievingly.  "True!"  Her lips formed rather than
spoke the word.

"Yes.  I _was_ under the influence of liquor.  But for that I should
have won the case, I believe."

"But," she faltered, "I don't--understand.  Why, I never saw you
in--that condition in my life!  I was there.  I--I heard you speak."

"It is not the first time," he said steadily.  "Nor the second, nor the
third.  Liquor helped me to win my cases.  I thought I had made it my
slave when it had made itself my master.  This time it failed me.  And
I--I failed my client," he added bitterly.

She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice.
Her own hurt was too keen.  She only heard the high-built structures of
her own ideals crumbling down about her feet.  "So Craig was right!"
she said under her breath.

"Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on.  "It is
because I must.  All my life I have cared very little what others
thought.  But--you--I care what you think.  I never knew how much till
now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!"  He bent
and took her hands.  "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"

Her lingers trembled in his grasp.  Pictures were flashing before her
mind--frost-stung October days when they had galloped with the baying
hounds, over the blown, tinted leaves and russet fields--winter
skating-parties on the frozen river, summer dances like that of
to-night, for which the music was now swinging a hundred yards
away--always it had been she and Harry Sevier.  He had been so superior
to the blandishments of the smaller vices.  Others had failed and
fallen; only he had remained on his pedestal, a type of brilliant
accomplishment.  She saw now his success as unenduring, fictitious, his
talents besmirched with the vice that was most hateful to her.  "Not
the first time, nor the second, nor the third!"  In their own circle
she had seen the dreadful cycle more than once repeated--the slow,
baleful fastening of habit, the struggle, the piteous, ignoble yielding
and the final slipping down to degraded depths from which there could
be no resurrection.  There was Chilly, her own twin-brother, with his
feet set on the same primrose path.  And now was it to be Harry Sevier?
She shuddered and drew her hand from his clasp.

"I--see," he said, in a slow, even voice.  "You can't trust me."  It
was not the Sevier that had kissed her hand who spoke now, but one whom
that gesture seemed to have flung an infinite distance from her.

"Can you trust yourself?" she asked.

Harry's tongue touched his lips--as it had done in his inner office on
the day of the trial, when he stood looking at her picture on his desk.
Since that day he had known no breath of the periodic craving.  But
now, curiously, he felt his mouth growing all at once arid and dry with
the old slinking thirst.  _Could_ he trust himself?  The question
seemed to thrust itself at him with a malevolent significance.  How
much of his will had he indeed, surrendered?  Did he know?

There rose up suddenly in him a savage resolution.  Not another drop
upon his lips--never, never!  Not for the sake of success, not for his
very life, never so long as he lived!

He took her hands in both his own, leaned down and kissed them.  Then,
without a word he went rapidly from her.




CHAPTER X

AFTER A YEAR

Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking
a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy
thoroughfare beneath.  Outside was the spring sunshine and the smell of
growing trees.  Just across from the building stood the city's new
Opera House, over whose ambitious entrance was still stretched a canvas
sign advertising a mass-meeting held the evening before under the
auspices of the Civic Club.

He read the lettering reflectively as he blew out clouds of the
fragrant, opalescent incense: "Protest Against Machine-Rule."  He
smiled.  The old revolt of the Quixotic handful against the entrenched
forces that had governed the city for a generation--one more of the
popular ebullitions which punctuate modern progress, the familiar
periodic dust-storms from whose turmoil the Old Guard emerged, moveless
as ever in the saddle, to a new campaign dictated by the mighty
Over-Lord, the great Public Services Corporation which, through its
multiple ramifications, assumed to control the state's franchises, to
dictate its significant legislation--even to influence its judiciary.
As he read the words on the canvas bellying in the breeze, his smile
was cynical.

Yet the smile had a touch of wistfulness too.  The movement had grown
out of the general unrest, the keener public conscience, that had
accompanied the political renaissance that in the past year had been
sweeping over a dozen commonwealths.  In the old southern city, wherein
principles were not yet become mere hypocrisies and folk still
preserved old-fashioned political ideals, it had attained to the
prestige of well-known names and engaging personalities.  Their
forefathers had been men to whom honour and cleanliness in public life
had meant all things and who had governed as naturally as they had
breathed.  And there were many among these to whom the new era, with
its open sneer at public trust and its subservience to great
aggregations of wealth selfishly employed, had become an increasing
reproach.  The man who gazed down from the office window had long ago
made his choice.  He had no illusions.  He knew to what allegiance he
owed his present position.  It had been the reward of long and faithful
service!  Yet sometimes still the bonds chafed--sometimes still the new
spirit that was stirring abroad struck through his ingrained habit,
calling to him to do the impossibly fanatical thing!

There was a knock at the door and a man entered.  It was Cameron Craig.
He responded briefly to the lawyer's greeting and coming to the window,
stood a moment beside him, looking down at the hurrying wheeled
traffic, the loitering pavement pedestrians--and the flapping canvas
sign.  He laughed a little, but without mirth.

"You were there, I suppose," he said.

Treadwell nodded.  "Yes.  It's tilting at the windmills, of course."

"They began too late," said Craig grimly.  "The ticket is safe enough
this year.  But next year--the Gubernatorial campaign--if they only had
fire enough to keep the blaze going till then, they might give us
trouble."

The other did not answer.  His eyes had rested briefly on Craig's face,
then again had sought the window.  He was thinking that his visitor had
not changed for the better during the past two months.  The fact,
indeed, would have been apparent to a casual eye.  The virulent force
and will were no less noticeable, but there was now a kind of glaze
over his face--a certain fierce and sullen quality that seemed a
reflection of inner bitterness.

The judicial eye clove to the fact.  Since that far-away night at the
"Farm," Craig's passion had never loosened its grip.  It was
characteristic of the man that he had on that occasion played the only
card in his hand, not blindly, but by instinct and without hesitation.
But while he had apparently gained his point, it had been borne to him
gradually that his very method of play had lost him infinitely more
than he had gained.  In the mind of the woman he desired he had
transgressed the rules of the game, and the realisation maddened him.
Never since then had he heard her name coupled with Harry Sevier's.
Never had he seen them together.  This had given him satisfaction.  But
if he had shattered her regard for the man whom he now hated more
tenaciously than he had ever hated anything in his whole life, the fact
had seemed to hold no advantage for himself.  On several visits to the
city, he had invented reasons to call at the Allen house, but he had
soon learned that he was not to meet Echo there.  He had, however, seen
her elsewhere more than once--when her gaze had gone by him as if he
had been empty air.  Though his veins burned with the fever of the
famished, he had not ventured to challenge that cold aloofness.  But it
had rankled and stung him almost beyond endurance, till he had come to
thirst avidly for some kind of test between them--for action, whatever
the result might mean.  And the fierce desire that raged within him,
feeding on itself, had left its sinister traces on his face.

Abruptly Craig withdrew his gaze.  "I see young Sevier held forth last
night.  The last time I heard him was in court, just a year ago.  The
young fop!  He'd do better to stick to his lawbooks--though I hear he
has no cases anymore."

"It's his own choice," the attorney answered coldly.  He liked Harry
Sevier and he resented the other's tone, no less than the words.  "He
could have a new client every day if he wanted.  As a matter of fact he
hasn't taken a case since the one you speak of.  He fought for six
months trying to get through an appeal on that.  It was the first
criminal case he had ever lost and it cut him up some, I fancy.  Of
course it's ridiculous to take it so to heart, but I swear I can't help
liking him for it!  He's not merely a fop, either.  In my opinion he
comes mighty near being just what that crowd at the Civic Club have
been looking for."

Craig's eyes had not left Treadwell's.  "In what way?" he asked.

"As a spokesman.  They know what they believe and what they want to
fight for.  But they've been inarticulate.  Most of them are
blue-blooded old fogies, with their souls full of fine ideals, but with
no leader.  In him (and in that speech of his last night he threw in
his lot with them absolutely) they have a finely trained legal
mind--for with all his old fire-works Sevier always had that--and a
natural orator besides.  You should have heard him last night!  For two
hours he held that great audience in a perfect spell.  'The finest
exhibition of southern oratory since the war' the papers called it this
morning, and I tell you, Craig, they weren't far wrong!"

He stopped, somewhat embarrassed by his own enthusiasm, and wondering
at the dark look on the other's face.  Perhaps to hide this, Craig
turned away.  His fingers were twitching and for an instant he was not
wholly master of himself.  When he spoke, however, he had regained his
governance.

"After all, it wasn't the future of this anti-machine campaign that I
came to talk about.  There's something nearer home that is worrying me."

"What's the trouble?"

"The Welles-Scott case decision.  It is to be handed down on the first
of May.  It must be in our favour."

The other looked surprised.  "But surely it will be."

"It's not on the cards.  I thought I knew the Judge, but there are
signs that I'm afraid of."

The attorney sniffed incredulously.  "Judge Allen!" he exclaimed.
"Why, the trust made him.  And it keeps him made, I should think, too."

Craig shook his head.  "He's been talking lately.  We've had warnings
from some who are very close to him.  This decision _must_ be what we
want it to be.  Voters are thinking more than they used to.  If these
Civic Club people keep up the agitation--particularly if they link on
to the prohibition movement, as they are likely to do--the distillery
may become a live issue in the next state campaign.  That's the great
danger.  And this Welles-Scott case strikes at the heart of the matter.
If the Trust loses this decision it will be the signal for a crop of
bills in the next legislature that will cost us a cool million to
fight.  And they may lead anywhere.  I tell you we _have_ to have it!"

The other mused a moment.  "The Judge, of course, can't be reached
in--in ordinary ways."

"Of course not.  He's not venal.  We've been able to depend on him so
long because he has grown up with the Trust--he was its counsel for
many years--and its interests were his.  He thought with it.  His mind
ran in the same groove.  But Beverly Allen, the Trust's counsel, and
Judge Allen of the Supreme Court are different propositions.  I always
thought this test case was a mistake!  But I was overruled.  Well,
we've got to have the decision.  If one way won't bring it about,
another shall.  Something will have to--persuade him.  He must have a
weak spot.  We must find it, that's all."

"His life's been an open book, if that's what you mean," said the
attorney, slowly.

"Few men's life are open books," returned Craig, with cynical
shortness.  "There's apt to be a page pasted down somewhere.  That part
of it is your business.  If there's any such page in his case, you find
it!  I don't care how small a page it is, or how long ago it was pasted
down.  If it's there I want it!"

"His record was combed with a fine-tooth comb when he went on the
bench," said Treadwell.  "The Trust wanted a man that the opposition
couldn't get anything on.  That was before your time, of course.  I
went over the report myself.  There wasn't anything there--nothing but
the vaguest suspicion of an old love affair that was polished off
twenty years ago."

Craig turned sharply.  "A love affair!  After his marriage?"

"Why yes, I think so.  But there weren't any details.  And the woman
died abroad long ago."

"What was her name?"

Treadwell looked at him curiously.  A faint flush had crept over his
face.  "See here, Craig," he said, "after all, there's a limit to
decency.  At the most it was nothing but a passing infatuation--an
innocent one.  There was not the faintest breath of scandal.  And as I
told you, the woman is dead."

Craig's eyes were boring into him.  "Treadwell," he said in a hard
voice, "you don't seem to understand.  This is a big game, and there is
no limit!  None!  And I intend to win it!  _What was her name?_"

The other leaned to knock the ash from his segar.  There was a tense
pause before he replied.  "I have forgotten."

"Where are the old reports?"

"They were destroyed."

Craig looked at him an instant, his eyes like sparkling points of
steel.  He opened his lips to speak, but he did not.  Instead, with a
shrug of incredulous contempt, he caught up his hat, turned to the
door, opened it and went out.

Treadwell listened to the heavy footsteps descending the stair.  Then
he went and shut the door.

"The hound!" he said under his breath.




CHAPTER XI

CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON

From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the
circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked
steadily at the Judge from under his bushy eyebrows, as the latter said:

"Yes, it is true that I was for years affiliated with the interests you
represent.  I was their attorney.  The connection ceased when I,
myself, severed it, eleven years ago."

Craig's lips, that had been set in a hard line, parted in a satiric
smile.  He was leading doggedly up to what he purposed to say.  "To its
profound loss," he said from the shadow.  "You had cogent reasons, no
doubt."

The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted.  "I'll
tell you, if you like," he said at length.  "But you will understand
that I challenge no one else's convictions.  I assume to sit in
judgment only upon my own."

Craig nodded.  "Of course."

"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when
I was a young man, just beginning practice.  The liquor problem was
young then too.  Communities did not take it too
seriously--particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of
course with gentlemen.  The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy
and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of.  To me--to the men I
knew--the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered
by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up--a kind of moral
seven-year locust--at periodic intervals.  People lived more or less as
their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations.  And
their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men'
right down to the war.  I had all the habits and prejudices of my
class.  Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to
minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious.  And
the decanter was never empty on my side-board.  Yet even then the new
element in politics and in every-day life--the sentiment against
liquor--was growing.  Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was
changing, and I knew--long before I admitted it to myself--that I was a
part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer
approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a
deepening and strengthening social current.  I was stubborn, but at
last there came a day when I--changed too."

His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling.
He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in
a black-leathern frame.  It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy
of perhaps fourteen.  He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:

"That is why I changed, Craig.  One night Chilly came home--drunk.  I
had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far
forget himself.  He was a mere boy, at school!  In that moment the
sharp truth came to me.  Shame stared at me from my own door-step.  I
saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears--in
my own son!"

He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table.  When he
spoke again his voice was more even:

"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I--saw.  Could anything
else have opened my eyes?  Perhaps not.  But that did.  I saw all at
once what I had been bolstering.  It was no longer a theoretical
question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the
community.  They were making a drunkard of _Chilly_!  The Trust
furnished their stock-in-trade.  And I had been the Trust's paid
tool--a part of its brain in this state--had guarded it from error,
shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made
possible its organisation as it exists to-day!  I, Chilly's father!
That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel.  I mailed it before I
slept."

There was a slight pause.  Craig's lowering look had been watching the
other curiously.  The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no
chord of response in him.  Rather it roused contempt--not for the son,
whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an
arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently
in his own mind.  To him no man's motives were pure.  The man before
him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature.  Had not the
Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat?  Was he fool enough
to think that he--Craig--was not aware of that?  It had expected him to
pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had.  And did the other
think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism--to
evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple?
Craig spoke:

"And--the Corporation.  What did it say?  Eh?"

"The president of the board came to see me.  He was good enough to ask
me to reconsider.  But I had made my choice."

Craig leaned forward, his arm on the little inlaid desk beside him.
"Let me finish," he said with deliberate meaning.  "The board,
accepting that decision with the keenest regret, desired to make your
retirement the occasion for showing in a tangible way its appreciation
of your long and faithful service.  A seat on the Supreme Bench being
vacant, the Directorate proposed, unless your taste pointed otherwise,
to use such influence as it might possess, to gain for your name the
consideration in that connection which it deserved."

A look of surprise had crossed the Judge's face as he began.  A
sensitive flush swept it as he ended.  "If you imply that my seat was
offered me, Mr. Craig, even tentatively, at that time, or in that
connection, you are in error!"

Craig's sneer was open now.  There was no more pretence.  "If not in so
many words, in effect!  Pshaw!  Do you mean to pretend you would have
had that appointment if the Trust hadn't backed you for it?  It owned
the state bag and baggage then, as it does now--and as it will continue
to do!  It put you on the Bench and it has kept you there, and you know
it!"

The Judge was on his feet now, his flush faded to pallor.  He deigned
no answer to the flung assertion.  "What is your object in coming to me
to say this?"  His voice was deep and resonant.

"Just this!"  Craig lifted his arm, his big fist clenched, his eyes
narrowed.  "You were the Trust's counsel and confident for twenty
years--till it put you where you are now!  Do you think it did that for
nothing?  It _made_ you, Beverly Allen!  And now it has reason to
believe that you intend to knife it in the back--to drag the ermine it
put on your shoulders into an incendiary hue-and-cry started by
demagogues who aim to destroy a great industry!"

"What do you mean, sir?"  The Judge's tone was icy.

"I mean the Welles-Scott decision!" Craig said in a low, deadly voice.
"That"--his clenched hand smote the light desk at his elbow with a
savage blow--"must be _ours_!"

For an instant there was blank silence.  The Judge stood aghast, his
very speech frozen with indignation.  To him his judicial calling had
an element that was almost sacred.  This man--to whom he had given the
hand of friendship, who had the _entree_ into the exclusive circles of
southern gentility--this man assumed to lay coarse fingers upon his
vestment of office, to question his integrity as a Judge!  He dared to
believe him, Beverly Allen, cheaply venal--a puppet, whose legal
rulings were at the beck and call of corporate influence!  The room
seemed suddenly stifling hot.  He turned to the window, flung the
curtains wide and drew a gulping breath of the fresh air.

He had not seen Craig's sudden start.  For at the smashing blow of his
fist on the fragile Italian desk, a curious thing had happened.  Its
catch loosened by the jar, a tiny carven panel had fallen with a little
click, and a thin sheaf of yellowed letters had dropped and spread
fan-wise beside his hand.  The backs of the envelopes were uppermost,
and across the top one was written in a dim, twirly hand and faded ink,
the initials _B.A._

A thought darted like cold lightning through Craig's brain.
"B.A."--Beverly Allen!  Whose were those old letters?  The initials
were in a woman's hand.  What if they held a clue to the old story
Treadwell, his attorney, had spoken of?  A quick instinct inspired him.
His hand closed over them quickly--went to his breast--as the Judge
turned from the window.

The latter had regained self-control.  He stood erect and tall, his
leonine head thrown back, his eyes shining, and in his face a look the
other had never seen in it before.  "You have presumed," he said, "to
say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your
corporation would dare to say.  And you have taken advantage of my
hospitality to say it in my own house.  I choose now to believe this
message an individual one, springing from a personal and base
initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once
served.  'Once,' I say.  For I serve it no longer.  I am now a member
of the Judiciary of this commonwealth.  Because the corporation
furthered my candidacy, you assume that it 'made' me.  Perhaps it did.
But it never owned my conscience or my integrity!  Nor does it now,
thank God!"

As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell.  "Nelson," he
said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."

Craig had risen to his feet.  He looked at the other an instant with
livid face.  Then he went rapidly to the hall and snatched up his hat
and stick.  The outer door closed heavily behind him.


In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters.
Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from
their worn envelopes and spread them open before him.  A look of
chagrin crossed his face.  No woman had written them; they had been
penned by the Judge himself--he was familiar with the heavy,
characteristic hand-writing.  Were they, then, only some old letters to
his wife, perhaps?  He was holding one leaf to the light.  Suddenly his
eye caught.  He made an exclamation.  His face lighted with amaze and
savage exultation.

What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the
very face of the man for whom he had craved it!  For on that leaf,
etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into
the daylight the corpse of an ignoble passion, cast scorn upon the
writer's name and blight and wither present and future!  How little,
after all, the tricks of the body changed!  Twenty years--and yet, _his
letter_!

What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long
dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion?  He, the
jurist of spotless living and good repute--to be shown forth to the
world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood
shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the scrap-heap in a
disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!"  The woman presumably
had scorned his offer--since she had sent him back his letters--and yet
on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white!  What
incredible folly had led him to preserve it?  Twenty years ago--in the
dead past--and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the
blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, damning and beyond denial!

He laughed aloud.  It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand!  If
he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would
strike her too.  She thought herself above him, did she?  What if this
story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club
and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners?  Would she hold herself so
high then?  Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring
her to his level!  He felt no prick of shame at the base move he
contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring.  Ambition
in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to
humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as
unyielding as steel.

He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket.  In
another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next
state.




CHAPTER XII

A HOSTAGE TO THE BOTTLE

The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so
enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which
had been wont on past occasions to gather at the old court-house when
he spoke, another revelation of Harry Sevier.  It had been
impromptu--not the outgrowth of deliberate plan.  The non-appearance of
a much-heralded speaker had thrust the exigency upon him without
warning, and he had acquiesced only in a keen desire to save from blank
failure a meeting in whose principles and object he was by his very
character deeply interested.  The tortuous involutions of local
politics had never interested him, but he had thrilled to the stirring
beneath the surface of the great forces of good and evil and the
present agitation for clean government had found him enrolled, without
question, on its side.

As he stepped forward to face the great curtain of faces that stretched
outward and upward beyond the footlights, he had not known what he
should say.  Indeed, while he slowly "felt" his audience in his opening
sentences, the sub-conscious part of his mind had been full of a matter
foreign to the subject at hand.  There had come to him a fleeting
recollection of the last time he had spoken in public--the day upon
which he had betrayed his client and put a man, of whose innocence an
instinct deeper-rooted than reason had convinced him, into the striped
habiliments of the convict.  The sharp, aching compunction of that
thought had never left him.  Since that day, though he went daily to
his sumptuous office, he had taken no new case.  He had gone always
with that sin clanking against his conscience and the memory of the
trial had focused always in that glimpse, across the mass of faces, of
a woman's look of puzzle and hurt.  During the months since then that
face had hung before his fevered vision as a far, cool oasis to the
desert wayfarer.  These had been black months of fierce, untiring
battle with the appetite to which he had surrendered himself, and which
he had sworn to conquer.  There had been times when the avid thirst had
seized him by the throat, when endurance had almost failed: days when
he had sat in his inner office, with door locked and blinds down,
fighting desperately with the strenuous impulse that seemed to be
dragging him bodily, as if with fleshly hands, to the little
wall-cabinet whose door had never been unlocked since the day of that
sinister court-recess.

During this prolonged, grappling struggle he had never been to
Midfields.  He had seen Echo but occasionally, walking or driving on
the street, or less frequently at functions from which he could not
absent himself without remark.  There had been no confidences between
them.  Never had he leaned to her to whisper: "You see!  Do I do well?"
Never had her lips said, "I know ... I know, and I am watching!" yet
his heart had told him that she was alive to the issue, that she felt
the forces conflicting for the mastery.  She had not been in the
audience on this day, but as the faces pulsed and receded till they
wove into a grey blur in the misty blaze of the incandescents, Harry's
inner vision had a swift memory of her face as it had looked in that
old court-house scene.

And with it, as though it had been a key to the disused mental
machinery, strangely and wonderfully there had come back to him, in a
sudden flashing illumination like summer lightning, a surging return of
the old power, the vivid rush of lambent images in his brain and the
burning, insistent phrase to his tongue--the power that he had thought
gone forever with that shuddering failure of a year before.

As he felt again the old native ability rising in him, strong and
undismayed, and once more his own, without hostage given to the bottle,
a stinging delight had swept through him.  It was the fruit of victory,
and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle.
Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of
self-shame.  Never in those old days had he employed that talent for
the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt
defeating of the clear ends of justice!  It was another Harry Sevier
who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom
principle was become a guiding star.  The leashed power and restraint
had been bred of that long struggle, and from the fresh mastery of self
which he had so hardly gained, flowed forth a subtle magnetic quality
that held his listeners mute.  In the hush that wrapped the great
assemblage the speaker of the day, late by an hour, had entered the
back of the stage, to wave back the nonplussed chairman and to seat
himself in the rear, enthralled by the white magic that swayed all
alike.  The speech had held no rodomontade, none of the pyrotechnics
that, had lent a flavour of sensation to past court trials.  It had
been on a higher plane than appeal to superficial feeling or ingrained
prejudice.  It had brought no accusation, pointed no finger, save
backward to old ideals of community respect, and forward to the wave of
independent thought that was sweeping over sister states to break in
thundering force upon the crags of misrule.

It had closed in a note of hope and of promise, and ended with the hall
hushed in that greatest tribute to true oratory--absolute silence.

Next day, wherever men congregated in the little capital, Harry
Sevier's name was on every lip.  It was flung wide, too, in newspaper
headlines until the ripple stirred far borders.  Of this he himself
could not be unaware.  He knew that never in the old days had he spoken
as he had spoken then.  He was conscious also that in the trial of
himself his faculties had been reorganised and renewed, had emerged
sounder and truer from the strenuous testing, and that the fire through
which he had passed had burned away the rubble and left metal that was
more worthy.  Nor could he fail to realise that at a single step he had
attained to a new and unfamiliar status in the community.  He felt this
not so much in the multiple congratulations of the many, as in a
certain new deference that he distinguished in more reserved greetings.

Beneath all, however, but one opinion profoundly concerned him--Echo's.
As he swung along the street this afternoon, the thought of her
excluded all others.

Rounding the corner, a voice came to him--a ribald, good-humoured
voice, inviting some one to "come and have a drink."  He turned
abruptly.  Chisholm Allen stood a little way from him, before a
swing-door through which sifted the clink of glasses and boisterous
conversation.

Chilly was decidedly the worse for wear.  Much water had run under the
bridges since he had tussled with old Nelson, the butler, over the
decanter of sherry.  His face was pallid and the marks of incorrigible
weakness and self-indulgence showed clearly through its habitual
good-nature.  Chilly's feet were set in the paths of dalliance and he
had ceased to care if anybody knew it.  He greeted the newcomer,
however, with a trace of embarrassment which he dissipated with a
laugh, as he said:

"The invitation's for you, if you like, Harry.  We'll have one to the
silver-tongued orator!  What do you say?"

For answer Harry linked an arm in his and turned him down the
street--away from the swing-door.  "Come up to my rooms, Chilly, it's
cool there and we haven't had a talk for a blue moon.  No, we'll
consider the drink afterward."

Just at the moment a carriage and pair bowled by them.  It was drawn by
the Allens' bays and Echo was on the rear seat.  She had seen the
action, had caught its import, and Harry had a flashing glance from her
dark eyes that sent the blood coursing to his fingers.  Chilly too,
however, had seen the swift exchange.  He frowned, then laughed again.

"You should join the Salvation Army," he said, satirically.  "They've a
rescue corps, I believe.  I know a pretty ensign, and she shall come
and pin a nice little medal on your manly chest!"

Harry smiled without resentment.  "The Army might not be so bad; it's
an outdoor life at any rate.  You'd be better for more of that."

"I believe you," said Chilly lugubriously.  "It's getting impossible
indoors.  Nothing doing but moral lectures nowadays.  If it weren't for
the Duchess I'd cut it."

"For 'somewhere east of Suez, where a man can raise a thirst'?" quoted
the other mildly.  "Travel is expensive, Chilly."

"Yes, confound it," was the reply.  "So is the thirst.  The old man
only allows me fifty dollars a month and I've stuck up every bar in
town to the limit."

A frown was on Harry's brow.  A year ago this youth had confined his
daily potations to the club, and his drinking-bouts to that sequestered
resort, "The Springs."  Now he drank openly in corner saloons--he, the
son of a southern gentleman, a member of the Supreme Bench, whose
forebears had been courtly and clean-living from the days of the
Colony!  They had turned into the apartment-building now, and a moment
later were in Harry's sitting-room, whose windows opened upon a square
musical with lisping leaves and the cool splash of a fountain.

It was an apartment that bespoke a keen though sober artistic taste:
grey walls with violet silk curtains at the deep windows and two or
three old paintings--among these, set on an easel, a Greuze that he had
unearthed in a cobwebbed curio-shop in Italy--a plain desk with a strip
of dull-coloured damask whose quaint Russian needle-work set off a few
books in tooled leather--a square piano of Circassian walnut spread
with an old brocade, against which a bowl of peonies splashed their
fleshy crimson--and deep, comfortable chairs.  Into one of these Chilly
threw himself.

"Well," he said, "here we are, as per schedule.  So trot out your
drink."

"It was that I wanted to talk to you about.  I think you know I'm your
friend, Chilly, and what I say I say as a friend.  Whisky is getting
the better of you."

"Pshaw!" scoffed Chilly, easily.  "You weren't always so mighty
particular.  When did you climb onto the water-wagon, I'd like to know?"

"When I found I was better off there.  I haven't touched liquor for a
year.  Take my advice, Chilly--it's sound!--and try to cut the drink
out.  It's doing you harm."

Chilly laughed.  "That seems to be the signal all along the line!" he
said humorously.  "But what's the good?  I could knock off any time I
chose, just as well as you.  But I don't intend to do it yet awhile.  I
like it."

There was a tentative knock at the door.  It opened and a girl's
piquant face peered in.  "Chisholm Allen!" said Nancy Langham's
indignant voice.  "Have you forgotten you have an engagement to take me
to the kennels this afternoon?"

Chilly sprang forward and seized her small gloved hands.  "Come in," he
said.  "There's nobody here but Harry and me.  Please do, Nancy."

"Oh, I mustn't!"  She turned to the latter.  "You see I needed Chilly
so _tremendously_, and Echo told me she saw him with you.  I expected
to meet him on the way.  Then I thought I'd just ring and ask for him,
only the hall door was open.  Chilly, you're outrageously undependable.
You know I wanted to get that dog to-day, because I'm going to leave
for home to-morrow, and you do know more about dogs than any one else."

Chilly looked a little shame-faced.  "I forgot all about it, Nancy.
Honestly, I did."

She sighed.  "That's the fact, no doubt, but it's not one bit
complimentary.  You're so dreadfully truthful, Chilly!  Come along now,
or we'll be too late."

"All right," he answered, drawing her inside the door.  "Just a minute.
Harry's going to give me a drink.  Weren't you, Harry, eh?"

For answer the other pressed a button and a trim silk-robed Japanese
came noiselessly from the next room.  "Fetch a bottle of Evien,
Suzuki," he said, "and some glasses.  Have it cold, please."

Chilly stared.  "Mineral water!" he exclaimed with sulky discomfiture.
"My word!  This is no signal for the H2O.  I'm _dry_!"

Harry shook his head.  "I'm sorry, but it's a rule of my house."

Chilly shrugged.  For an instant a little sneer drew down his lips,
irritation fighting with his seldom-failing good-humour.  He turned to
the square piano, sat down on its stool, and ran his fingers up and
down the ivory keys.

"I'll return good for evil," he said.  "Before we go I'll give you a
little ballad I've just composed.  It's bound to make a great hit when
it strikes the Barbary Coast.  He struck a resounding chord, and with a
wink at Harry, began to sing:

  "The rounder swore at his barroom score
    'Ere he called for a last, long bottle,
  And proceeded to tint, without any stint,
    His nose with a mellow mottle.
  Then he climbed on a chair and hiccoughed long
    And loudly he sang this funny old song:

        "'Money is dross,
        Loving is loss,
  There's never a crown that is worth its cross!
        Life is a toss,
        Dying is moss,
  But booze--Oh, bully old booze, is boss!'"


There was something of whimsical fun, yet of bitter recklessness in the
spectacle.  Without technical training, Chilly had music in his
finger-tips and a fair baritone voice.  The fingers wavered now and
then and the voice was shaken a little, but it was full of magnetism,
as, swaying lightly on the stool, he rolled out the slangy doggerel
with all the unction of a music-hall artist:

  "Then the mixer laughed till the cat went daft
    And the roof clanged all its gutters,
  While the loungers yelled with mirth unquelled
    Till they shook the very shutters;
  And a sweet-faced devil peeped over the steins
    And merrily carolled the lilting lines:

        "'Money is dross,
        Loving is loss,
  There's never a crown that is worth its cross.
        Life is a toss,
        Dying is moss,
  But booze--Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"


Harry's nerves were on edge.  It was not the cheap vulgarity of the
jingle nor the patent swagger of the performer, but the
under-suggestion of the picture.  The edge of this qualm had touched
him on the street, with the odour of Chilly's breath and the moist tang
of hops that had floated through the swinging-door.  Now he felt a
sudden anger that the coarse picturing and the tinkling keys had power
to call up, even for an instant, the old slinking, craving ache in his
throat.

Chilly swung round and got up laughing.  "Pretty good, eh, what?" he
said.  "Come along, Nancy; we'll go and pick out that dog!  So long,
Harry."

Harry opened the door for them.  He did not trust himself to speak.  As
Nancy's hand lay an instant in his on the threshold, a wave of sudden
pity engulfed him.  Her cheeks were mist-pale and her girlish lips were
trembling.




CHAPTER XIII

THE HEART OF A MAN

An hour later Harry sat in the same pleasant room, looking out where
curdled clouds set their silver sails in the pale shimmer of sky.  A
light breeze fluttered the figured-silk curtains, a blue-bottle buzzed
tentatively to and fro outside, and birds were fluting in the trees of
the small park and splashing joyously in the fountain.

The encounter with Chilly had broken into his mood, which had been
occupied with more inviting things.  Now, alone, the thought of what
this day held for him absorbed him.  "One year!" he had said to himself
on the day of that old court-house trial.  "That is the test I will
give myself.  It is enough.  If I can beat the brandy for a year, I can
beat it forever!"  To-day was an anniversary; this afternoon the year
was up.  The period had called up all his courage, had searched out
with prying fingers every crevice of weakness, explored insistently
each avenue of uncontrol.  But he had won the long battle, and the
resurgence of the old power that had come to him in his yesterday's
speech had crowned the victory with confidence.  Yesterday he would
have died sooner than to have wrung from his lips what he should say to
her--to Echo--to-day!

When the tall old clock in the corner next chimed he rose and called,
"Suzuki!"

The Japanese servant of spotless raiment entered with noiseless
footsteps.

"Tell Aunt Judy I sha'n't want dinner to-night," said Sevier; "I'll
dine at the club.  You can take the night off, if you like; I'll let
myself in."

"_Hai-e!_"  Suzuki sucked in his breath and his oval eyes allowed
themselves a gleam of satisfaction.  As he brought his master's hat and
stick Harry looked at him meditatively, wondering, as he had wondered a
thousand times, what lay behind that secret-keeping, brown face with
its perpetual, half-smiling gravity.  He had picked him up a half-dozen
years before in his travels, a shabby and abject adventurer with an
English dialect that was fearfully and wonderfully made; and the
youthful flotsam had speedily and without apparent tuition blossomed
forth into that inestimable jewel, a perfect valet.  With Aunt Judy the
cook, who had been a servant of his father's, Bob the chauffeur who was
her son, and Suzuki, Harry's bachelor _menage_ in the city stood a
model of its kind, and the despair of his associates.

Harry walked slowly along the street clanging with cars, on pavements
busy and sunny at first and giving place gradually to wedges of lawn
and stretches of deserted foliaged flagging as he approached the
suburbs.  At the big gate of Midfields he lifted his eyes.  Mrs. Allen
was just stepping from her electric at the curb, cool and statuesque
and smiling.

"A penny for your thoughts!" she said.  "I really believe you were
counting the flag-stones.  I hope you were coming in--you've been
shamefully oblivious of our pleasure this season!"

"I've been oblivious of my own," he countered, opening the gate for
her.  "But I'm going to make amends in future."

They walked leisurely up the drive under the acacias, chatting.  She
had often wondered, in the old days, whether there were not some
understanding between him and Echo, and his long absence had puzzled
her.  But he had apparently gone nowhere else, and she welcomed his
return.  He was a distinctly eligible _parti_, and Echo had reached a
point where the future was a pertinent thing.  There had never been
between the mother and daughter that close _rapport_ which existed
between daughter and father; Mrs. Allen had never felt that she
understood Echo.  She had never known for her, even as a child, the
fierce and excluding yearning which she had lavished on Chisholm, and
which had grown even stronger with the latter's increasing years and
delinquencies.  But she had Echo's interests thoroughly at heart, and
Harry Sevier--particularly since his speech at the Opera House--had
attained to importance in her worldly estimation.

"I haven't congratulated you," she said presently.  "Your speech!  It
was a masterly thing."

"You were there?  I'm glad I didn't know it.  It would have deepened
the blueness of my funk."

"Flatterer!"  She tapped him on the arm with her parasol.  "But I'm not
wholly pleased, I assure you.  The headlines are prophetic, I'm afraid.
Presently the politicians will seize upon you, and the first we know
you will be in Congress--or the Senate--and the town will have lost
you.  That's the way it goes!"

"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "who is the flatterer now?"

They had reached the big porch and she drew him into the hall and to
the blue parlour, where the Judge sat with Echo, leisurely munching
toast.  "I've brought Mr. Sevier," she announced, "with his laurels
thick upon him, just in time for tea.  For my part, I am a wreck from
the sun and I shall take mine in my room.  But you'll come soon again,
won't you?"

She passed out, faintly smiling and leaving a perfume of heliotrope
behind her, without waiting Harry's answer, which seemed indeed to be
given to Echo, since his hand held hers at the moment and his eyes were
on her face.  The sight for him had blotted everything else.  The
restful room with its cool shadows, the Judge--all seemed to retire
into an inextinguishable and meaningless background, leaving only them
two, together.  In the year past he had never been so near her; now he
marked that while her hair had the same familiar whorl and golden
under-lights, her face seemed more serious than of old, her eyes deeper
and more wistful.

Since that far-away evening at the Country Club, Echo had passed
through a confusion of experiences, the more trying as they had been
locked in her own breast.  It had been more than Harry Sevier: it was
her love for him that had been fought over during that long year.  When
he had left her that night with his kiss burning on her hand, she had
known instinctively that he had gone to do battle.  What she had said
had stung him deeply, yet she could not have recalled a word.  It had
been the cry of wounded pride, of stricken ideals, of reproach, of
protest against the dominancy of the thing she hated over the man she
loved.  As the long months of autumn and winter wore away she had
seemed, with a singular clarity of vision, to see his temptation and to
enter spiritually into his struggle.  They had met only a few times and
then in public places and more than once her eye had distinguished the
traces of the conflict.  Something deep in her had told her that when
he came to her again that conflict would be ended.  So, at sight of him
on the threshold, Echo's heart had leaped into turbulent beating.
Here, at last, they were face to face--it was the closure of the past,
the burgeoning of the new!

There was a desultory conversation over the tea, and then the Judge
went back to his chair in the library, and they two strayed out through
the open French-window to the wide porch.  There, on the top step, she
sat down, leaning back against one of the big columns, up which a
crimson rambler climbed.  He sat lower, at her feet.  The smile had
faded from both their faces, and a rose that was on her breast, from
the tumult of her heart, showered its petals on the stone.  He could
see the old sun-dial gleaming from its tangle of ivy.  He knew its
quaint motto:

  _Hours fly, flowers die.
  New men, new ways,
      Pass by;
      Love stays._

After a silence he lifted his gaze.

"You didn't think," he said in a low voice, "that I stayed away because
I--because that same thing had ever happened since the day of the
trial?"

"No," she answered, gently, "I knew it hadn't."

A uniformed imp on a bicycle--a postal messenger--careened wildly up
the drive with a special delivery letter.  They saw him deliver it to
old Nelson at the side portico and pedal whistling down a by-path.

"Then," he said quickly, "you know now that it never can again?  It has
been a year, a round year to-day.  I made up my mind that I would not
come to you till the last day was out."

"I felt that, too," she said.  "I knew what you were thinking.  I--I
even guessed the year.  Was it--so hard?"

"Yes," he answered.  "But it would have been harder if I hadn't found
it out when I did.  The sting of all these months," he went on, "has
been your thought of me!  Every day, every hour, I have seen you as you
looked that night at the 'Farm.'  I shall never deserve that look
again--Echo!"

She turned toward him at that, as if with a sudden impulse, her eyes
like sapphire stars, her lips parted, but she did not speak.  The
failing sunlight spattered down through the moving foliage in
green-gilt flashes that tinged her face and touched her hair with the
soft burnish of Venetian gold, like that of a figure he remembered in
St. Mark's.  Behind her reared the seamed and grey old column--a faded
background of age for a figure of immortal youth--and he knew suddenly
that the picture of her, as he saw her at that moment, had covered
forever the painful memory.  There was only the ardent, unconditional
now: only Echo and the dear old porch and the dimming daylight--and a
bluebird singing from the heart of a tree--ever henceforward to be
symbols to him of woman's love and--home!

He leaned toward her, his hand groping for hers, outstretched on the
cool stone beside her, and said in a voice shaken, in spite of himself:

"Echo--it _is_ just as it was a year ago, isn't it?"

She caught her hand--the one he groped for--to her cheek.  She rose,
and for an instant it seemed as if she had not heard.  Then her glance
wavered and fell and a bright, rich colour stained her cheeks like a
sudden flush of rosy sun-set.  But she had slightly turned away and he
did not see it.

"Ah!" he said, looking up at her.  "I may say it now--may I not?--what
you must have known all along.  I love you, I love you!  Only you and
your love, dear--that is all I ask of God!...  Echo--"

There was a sudden sound behind them, a hoarse cry from the room they
had left.  Both turned sharply toward the French-window.  Then she was
down the long porch like a flying shadow.

He followed, to find her bending over the form of her father, slipped
sideways on the leathern sofa, his face bluish-white and a paper
crumpled in his rigid hand.  At the same moment Nelson thrust his
woolly head through the rear door.

"Quick!" she cried, kneeling beside the couch.  "He has fainted.  Call
mother."  He went, his aged features twitching with fright.

"I will send Doctor Southall," said Harry quickly.  He touched her
hand, and with a single backward look at her, hurried out.  She heard
his step speeding down the gravel drive.

Echo laid a tremulous hand upon her father's, and at the touch the
tense fingers relaxed and a crumpled brown paper dropped from them.
She snatched it up--was that what had made him faint?  She spread it
out: it was a photographic print, unmounted, of the last page of a
letter, in his own handwriting.  Across the top was printed, in the
purple, noncommittal lettering of a typewriter, "For possible release
May 3rd."

Then as she gazed, over the agitation of her face grew a shocked
bewilderment that rushed headlong to realisation.  She started to her
feet, and a vivid scarlet flooded her pale face from chin to brow, then
slowly ebbed, leaving behind it a frozen anguish.  The print fell from
her hand.  At the same moment the Judge stirred and opened his eyes.
He saw her standing before him; knowledge slipped back.

"Echo--"

She turned swiftly.  He had struggled to a sitting posture--his gaze
fastened on the crumpled paper on the rug.  A little spasm crossed his
face.  "Reach me that," he said.

She picked it up and laid it in his hand, and he put it into his pocket
with shaking fingers.  He passed his hand across his forehead.
"Where's Sevier?" he asked dully.

"He went to send the doctor.  We were on the porch and heard you cry
out."

"Ah, yes, I--remember.  I tried to call you.  I lost track of things
for a minute or two, I reckon, But it's nothing.  I've had little
spells like this before.  I don't need Southall--send Nelson to tell
him not to come.  I'm all right."

Unheeding her protests, he rose and went to his chair, as Mrs. Allen,
with unaccustomed agitation on her face, swept into the room.




CHAPTER XIV

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL

Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library.  There
was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray
on which was a little huddle of brown ashes--all that remained of the
photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him.  He
sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but
really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his
side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves
and moonshine.

He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.

All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single
lapse--that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters
of his nature.  It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of
the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually--as a
spotless lily springs from the silt--a flower of recompense, which, its
roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later
life.  His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and
honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the
missed.  And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a
gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him!
Unless he paid the penalty--with his professional integrity!

The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was
lost.  His had not been.  It had only been covered.  Somewhere that old
leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn
of the wheel to bring it to light.  By some satanic twist of
circumstance it had come to the hands of his enemy--Craig was his enemy
now--and in his hands it spelled his own ruin.  What weapon was there
to fight with?  None.  However dastard the act that spread it to the
world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited,
undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those
things which were the breath of his life.  He thought of his wife--of
Echo.  For them humiliation, looks askance.  His decision on the
Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer--lacking only his
signature writ at the bottom--the most vital and far-reaching decision
of any he had rendered.  On the first of May it was to be handed down.
He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!"  On
that day he would be placarded in the public prints!

A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find
thee out."  He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no.  But
chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man
thinketh in his heart, so is he."

The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes.
Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision,
perjured himself.  Right, by another judgment, would have its way in
the end.  The act would save him from shame--would save others as well.
What did it matter?  Would not such a solution be best for all
concerned?

"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"--it was curious how the
banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some
boyhood covert of his brain!  Not matter?  Ah, how much it mattered!
Escape by that road was impossible for him.  And there was but one
other road by which he could evade the issue.

He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers.  A
small silver-mounted revolver lay there--pointing the one way out.  He
picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal,
then laid it on the desk.  He took a sheet of paper from its place and
began to write: "Dear Echo--"

He started; no, that would not do.  He began again: "Dear Charlotte
and--"

He paused an instant and listened--his hearing had caught some sound
above-stairs.  It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the
writing.  But his fingers would not frame the words.  He laid aside the
pen.  Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty
speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a
softened memory!

It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard.  For
hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful
pictures flitting under her closed eyelids.  Her home world, which had
always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had
suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and
shaming, piteous revelations.  Her own father's past had held a secret
that would not bear the light!  That he had loved another woman than
her mother--afterward--that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps
he could not have helped.  But that he had ever, ever as a passing
phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of
consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror.  Now,
through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless
woman--of a blackmailer.

For that was what it seemed to her.  It did not occur to her that his
letter might have fallen into other hands.  In her imagination, back of
the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his
complete undoing, in his youth, now--a very wanton!--holding out the
badge of his indiscretion, for a price!  The photograph had come to him
with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd."
Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's
printer's-proofs.  It meant released for publication.  His letter was
to be spread broadcast--unless he met the demand!  The hideous
vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and
humiliation over her.  It seemed suddenly that their conventional,
well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and
hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the
yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play.  Thoughts such as these
had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and
her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the
reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.

Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving
an overmastering sense of his trouble.  Since Nelson had helped him to
his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for
though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused
to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner.  She wondered
whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like
hers.  Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving
anxiety.  That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its
operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called
from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had
sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her
mind with a sense of warning.  She slipped out of bed to peer through
the blind.  She could see a window of the library: light was sifting
from between its heavy curtains--her father was not in his room, then;
he was there.  She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a
kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.

The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge.  He
was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold.
His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.

What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for
others, if not for himself.  He would have rendered no decision on the
crucial case.  With his escape the problem would solve itself.  Craig
would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter.  "Why not?"
he muttered.  "It is justifiable--it is neither gross nor cowardly--to
issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame
from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!"  His wife was
provided for.  His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected
with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred
existence.  Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier.  And
Chilly--of what earthly use was his life to Chilly?  "I will do it," he
said to himself.  He stretched out his hand--toward the silver-mounted
revolver.

But he drew it back.  A further clearer conception had come to him in
that last instant to give him pause.  What, after all, was he about to
do?  Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act
he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a
trust that he held for the State?  He was a public officer, who had
taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the
functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not.  For him the
sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission.  Would
such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason
than the rendering of a mendacious one?  Either equally besmirched his
honour!  Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than
his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed.  No, whatever the
outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through
with it to the bitter end!  He buried his face in his hands.

As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in
the room.  Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling.
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.  "Echo!" he cried
and rose to his feet.

[Illustration: He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet]

She came to him quickly, a little diffidently.  "I couldn't help it,
dear!  I felt you--worrying, and I had to come."  Suddenly her eyes
fell on the revolver on the desk.  She sprang and snatched at it in
panic.  "That!  Oh, not that!  Not that!"

"I--it was in my drawer," he said.  "Surely you--"

"Ah," she cried.  "I know!  You--you received a letter this afternoon.
It made you faint.  You haven't been yourself since you read it.  And
now you--"

He drew a shaking hand across his eyes.  "No, dear," he said more
steadily.  "It would not have been--what you think.  There was a moment
when--but it has gone, and forever."  He took the revolver from her
hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it.  "There," he said, "I
give you the key.  It will not happen now."  There was in his wailing
speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.

Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarrassment.  "Can
you--can't you tell me what the letter was?"

He looked at her palely, his features working.  She would have to know
soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her.
What would she think of him?  "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was
a young man, I wrote an--an unwise letter.  It--it had to do with some
one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I--I treasure.
The threat is made now to publish it, and this would--would shame and
harm that memory and me."

"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered.  The picture her fancy
had painted was fading out.  "Then how--"

"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."

"And it must come back to hurt you--to spoil your life now!  Something
written before I was born!  It sha'n't!  It sha'n't!"  She spoke with
passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the
horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming
thing at which she had snatched.  "But you can pay the price, no matter
how much it is!  Take my pearls--my rings--my gowns."

He shook his head.  "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my
honour.  I am required to alter my judicial decision on the
Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."

She looked at him with parted lips.  "The Welles-Scott case!"

"Yes.  Much hangs on this decision.  The great corporate interests--but
you would not understand."

She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him.  A great
compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at
the cowardly attack upon him.  She had known of such conscienceless
warfare in political life--acts of "character assassins" which knew
neither pity nor honourable scruple.  "Who has the letter?" she asked.

"Cameron Craig.  It came with his card."

She started violently.  Cameron Craig!  He who had once asked her to
marry him, who had asserted his love for her--he, now bent on her
father's ruin!  She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw,
those lowering, determined eyes.  Cameron Craig?  She lifted a stricken
face.

"You see!" he said.  "I remember you once said to me that he was not
'one of us.'  He isn't.  That is why I know that he will stop at
nothing.  He will do what he threatens.  There is no way out."

She rose to her feet.  Her heart was beating so that her breath came
with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes.  "You will hand down
the decision."  It was a statement, not a question.

"God help me--I must!"

"When?"

"A week from to-day, as I have announced."

She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still
clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead.  Even in
that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a
passing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.

"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily.  "You are going to
your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"

She nodded, her cheek still against his.  "I shall take the early
train, before you are up.  But I shall be back next day."

She withdrew her arms.  "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked
at the locked drawer.  "You will not--you will not--"

"I promise," he said.

"Whatever happens?"

"Whatever happens."

An instant later she was gone.




CHAPTER XV

THE ONLY WAY

As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it
seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived
long ago and discarded--as if she were suddenly an intruder into the
peace and quiet it enfolded.  For though her hands were like ice, her
veins were beating hot and her mind was filled with the heat of a fiery
furnace.

Cameron Craig held her father's name, his career, his whole happiness,
and that of them all--her mother, Chilly, herself--in his hand.  His
was the power to crush and to ban.  This man had professed to love her.
She remembered what he had said to her that day in the garden--a year
ago: "Since I met you the whole world has been changing for me....  You
have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has
coloured all I have thought and done ... Echo, Echo!"  The words seemed
to wreathe about her, to return to her in pelted reverberations from
the wall.  She could save the situation.  She could marry Cameron Craig.

The weird thought had rushed through her like a cold flame with the
voicing of that name in the library.  He would do it.  More than the
decision, more than any material ambition, he desired her.  The
letter--and the photographic plate--should be the price!

As she fought with herself through the long night hours, distraught yet
tearless, it came to her with agonised reiteration that the resolve
marked the end for her of all that makes life young.  Up to a year ago
she had been a girl; her deeper emotions had been unstirred, her soul
unknown to herself.  Only from the moment at the "Farm" when she had
sent Harry Sevier from her to his battle with appetite, had she known
the real meaning of life.  Since then she had had the sweetness of
learning love's unfolding in denial, and that very day it had come to
fruition.  Could it have been only that afternoon that the confession
had trembled on his lips, when her heart had seemed to beat audibly,
like little songs of joy?  Now the cup was dashed from her lips.  And
he would never know--she could never tell him!  That was the deep and
piteous treason to which she must contribute!

She crept to the window and looked out over the garden, its elfish
vapours dimly lighted by a thin, silver crescent-moon that seemed
hanging like a gipsy ear-ring from a swarthy cloud.  Below her the
box-bordered paths showed in a sunken cross.  The hemlock in its
centre, with its triple spires, had been brought, a tiny seedling, by
her great-great-grandmother from White Sulphur Springs, rooted in a
gourd tied on the back of an old buff-coloured coach.  The old lady's
quaint portrait hung still in the dining-room, just above the
diamond-leaded cabinet that held the tea-set of gold and lapiz lazuli
blue, from which Jefferson and Randolph had drunk, and her garlanded
silver basket whose inscription read, "From a lover of fifty years to
his bride."

Echo felt a little shiver in her heart, as painful contrasting pictures
thronged before her disordered fancy--pictures of herself as Craig's
wife.  She saw herself, young in years but with sere joys and blasted
ideals, all youth's impulses dead in her, the wife of a man whose
bodily presence she loathed and whose character, even before this, she
had detested.  A chill passed through her, and she dropped the curtain
and shut out the moonlight.  But what if her father stood ruined, the
mark of public pity and covert sneers?  She thought of the
pearl-handled revolver.  He would have given his life to checkmate
fate, if that had but been possible to him.  And she was his daughter!

But to give _herself_, her body, her soul!  To go to this man, to live
with him, to bear his name--she shrank from the thought as at the touch
of white-hot iron.


When the tiny ormolu clock on her dressing-table struck five she drew
up the blind.  Dawn, with its coral sandals, was tiptoeing over the
garden, hanging dew-diamonds on the rose-bushes, swinging her censer of
multifold perfume to the waking flute of the birds.  She bathed her
face and smoothed her hair, then put on a dark travelling dress and
packed a small bag, putting into it only linen and a few
toilet-accessories, with a closed silver frame, heart-shaped, whose
twin sides held miniatures of her father and mother.  Last she unlocked
a tin box in her drawer, took some money which it contained and put it
in her pocket.  Then, bag in hand, she went downstairs.

In the dining-room Nelson held up his hands, pink-lined palms outward.

"Mah Goodness, honey!" he ejaculated.  "Reck'n yo' didn' sleep 'tall
las' night, what wid Marse Beve'ly took so yistidy.  Yo' look jes' lak
er ghos'.  Now yo' set down en drink some hot coffee en eat plenty
chick'n en waffles.  Ain' gwine find nuthin' _half_ ez good on dat ar'
dinin'-cyah, nohow!"

The warmth of the coffee was grateful to her, and while the old man
hovered about her she made a pretence of eating, answering his
protestations with monosyllables, in fact scarcely knowing what she
said, for her mind was busy with other things.  'Lige, the driver,
would wait to put her on the train--she must take the up-train then, as
he expected her to do.  And it was an express: she could not leave it
till it reached the junction, hours later.  There, however, she could
take the other road--the Southern.  There must be an afternoon train,
and that, though by a round-about way, would bring her finally to her
destination.

When carriage-wheels sounded from the drive she went into the library
and seated at her father's desk, wrote a note.  It was to Harry Sevier.
She sealed and addressed it with a hand that shook a little, and gave
it to Nelson with instructions to send it during the morning.  The old
negro put her into the carriage, with her bag and tucked the cover
about her with loving hands.

She caught a breath, uneven like a child's.  "You'll--take good care of
father, Nelson?"

"Bress yo' li'l ha'at, ah'm sho' gwine watch Marse Beve'ly lak er
_hawk_.  He'll be all right, en yo' be back termorrer."

"Yes," she said faintly.

As the carriage whirled into the roadway, she turned her head to cast a
straining gaze up the silent drive to the old house.  Then the acacias
shut it from her view.




CHAPTER XVI

DERELICT

In Harry Sevier's outer office his clerk glanced backward with a
startled expression, his law-book dropping from his fingers.  "That's
queer," he muttered.  "I never heard him laugh like that before.
Doesn't sound like a joke, somehow."

He rose and tapped lightly on the inner door, which he had closed upon
his employer a moment before.  But there was no response and he went
back to his seat--and the volume he was studying.  "Wonder if it was
that note I gave him," he speculated.

The tap had fallen on deaf ears.  Harry was sitting in the other room,
rigidly staring at the note in question.  There was on him a feeling of
actual physical sickness.  He did not know that he had laughed.  At
last he rose, and crumpling the written sheet into a ball, laid it in
the fire-place and struck a match.  His fingers worked clumsily and he
broke several short off before a flame showed and he stooped painfully
and held the match to its edge.  He remained in the crouching posture
while the paper blazed merrily up.  In the charring heat it crackled
and opened, showing for a brief instant in the baleful, blackening,
light two sentences it had contained: "_Think as gently of me as you
can.  I can never marry you--never._"

He stood up dazedly and groped his way to a chair.  So this was the
end!  She, Echo, whom he had thought so true, she had been playing with
him--and now the game was over.  To her he had been only a puppet, a
card in hand to be played off, discarded for the winning of the greater
point.  Poor, brainless, fool that he was!  There was no longer a
yesterday--no dear eyes holding his, no Eden wind blowing the
rose-petals nor silver stars swinging the incense of the gods!  He had
been living in a fairy-tale, a castle in Spain, a fool's paradise,
hugging a ridiculous dream, that had had no reality to her, had been
but a chapter of coquetry, to which she now wrote _finis_!  "Think
gently!"  This was the epitaph of her flirtation with Harry
Sevier--flung away, raked under, thrust from sight, a thing for the
scare-crow and the scavenger!

He got up and going slowly to the window, stood many minutes with his
forehead against the pane.

What remained for him?  To sweep out of his life the shards of that
beautiful thing that lay destroyed forever?  To saunter on, with
hypocritical smirk and affected nonchalance, down the empty declivity
of professional habit, to an undesirable goal?  To what end?  Of what
value had been his striving?  A year ago he might have won her--no one
else had had more than a slight hold upon her then.  It had been that
long denial that he had set himself that had undone him!  What profit
to him that he had won the mastery over himself, had cut the tentacle
coils that were enwinding him?  Of what had been the use?

There darted through his racked mind the sorry jingle that Chilly had
once roared in his rooms:

        "Money is dross,
        Loving is loss,
  There's never a crown that is worth its cross.
        Life is a toss,
        Dying is moss,
  But booze--Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"


Why not "cut it all," as Chilly had longed to do?  Plunge out along the
numb, reckless way whose well-remembered mile-stones suddenly beckoned
him--anyhow, anywhere, only to muffle the pain that plucked at him--to
sodden and sink himself in blessed oblivion, like a stone in a pool!

A thing that had lain torpid and dormant in the dregs of his being
thrust up its head.  It was as though a chain snapped in his brain, and
what had been shackled there reared, savage and exultant.  On the desk
sat a photograph in a silver frame.  Once he had been used to turn this
face-down when that cabinet was opened a year ago!  He picked this up
and with a sudden wrench of his powerful fingers bent and broke it
across again and again, crushing metal and board into a shapeless
battered twist, and flung it into the fireplace.  He snatched up a
heavy paper-weight and with one blow smashed in the door of the little
wall-cabinet.  The glass fell in a shower of silvery tinkles to the
floor.  He seized the black bottle that sat there--with the rusty
goblet--poured the latter to the brim and drank it off--once, twice,
three times.

He went into the main office.  Its occupant was on his feet in alarm at
the crash of shattered glass in the next room.  "How much money is
there on the premises?"

The clerk looked in a drawer.  "About sixty dollars.  It's the last
payment on--"

"Give it to me," said Sevier shortly.  He pocketed the wad of bills the
other handed him.  "I'm going on a journey--abroad," he said.  "I may
be gone some time--in fact, I know I shall.  Don't forward anything,
and close up the office till I return.  You will draw, as usual, of
course."  In another moment he was giving directions--over the
complaisant wire--to his bank.  He had always kept his leisure clear by
putting the small details of daily routine book-keeping, as he
expressed it "on the other fellow"; however long his desertion, rent
and camp-followers should be paid with regularity.

Ten minutes later his valet, in a suit of spotless white linen, let him
into his apartment.

"I'm off for a vacation, Suzuki," he said.  "To-night, when Bob comes
for orders, tell him to put the car up till I want it.  You can go to
night-school and rub up your 'Yingleesh.'"

The Japanese blinked.  "A'right," he said.  "When we see you some more?"

"When I get back."  Sevier lifted a book from the table.  "Take this to
Mr. Treadwell's--his house, not his office--you understand.  There's no
message; it belongs to him.  Don't wait; go at once."

When he had closed the outer door on the valet, Harry drew a long
breath.  He opened another door and listened.  He could hear Aunt Judy
rattling crockery in the kitchen, humming as she laboured.  He would be
undisturbed, the coast was clear.  His veins were beating hot now with
the brandy, and the sickness was gone.  In the old days the reaction
had been slow and grudging.  But during the year his body had refreshed
itself.  The inured crust of usage was stripped away, and the physical
side responded speedily.

He went into his dressing-room and threw open the huge walnut wardrobe
that effaced one wall.  It was hung from end to end with clothing.  He
selected a cheap dun-coloured suit which he had purchased abroad years
before for a walking-tour, of whose strenuous occupations it showed
some traces in wear, a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, companion of
sundry long-ago fishing excursions.  He took a nail-scissors and
painstakingly cut from each article its maker's name.  In the
bath-room, first with shears and then with a razor, he cut off his
crisp dark beard: never, since his college days abroad, had he seen his
own face like that.

Finally arrayed, he regarded himself in the cheval-glass.  The Harry
Sevier of sumptuous apparel and perfect grooming, the familiar spirit
of the place, was gone.  In his stead there stood an unfamiliar
presence, with smooth-shaven chin and knock-about clothing.  And the
stranger looked from the depths of the mirror with a gaze from which
something tempered and remorseful had vanished, a gaze of avid
recklessness and strange, irresponsible daring, the look of one
standing on the sheer verge of any hazard, welcoming any throw of the
dice, fearing nothing and caring nothing.

As he stood, his hand encountered a small hard object in his pocket.
He drew it out.  It was a ring, roughly made and holding an uncut
emerald almost square in shape.  He remembered that once, in the woods,
he had bought it for a whim from some gipsy caravan--a luck ring.  Much
luck it had brought him!  Well, it was the gipsy-road now for him.  He
drew off his seal ring and thrust the other on his finger in its place.

He went quickly out the front door and down to the entrance pulling his
hat brim well over his eyes on issuing to the street.  As he did so he
grazed a lady leisurely passing.  It was the plump and pretty Mrs.
Spottiswoode.  Her glance met his fairly, but there was no sign of
recognition; she only drew her trim, modish skirt away from the contact
as she passed on.

He walked more rapidly now.  He could scarce keep from running--would
have done so but for the thronging crowds.  The brandy he had drunk in
the office had roused the devil of craving; it was in his throat now
like the rasp of hot sand-paper and he craved more alcohol with a
desperate craving that would not be denied.  At the edge of the open
square which held the railroad station he plunged into a saloon and
pushed through its groups of loungers to the bar.

"A flask of whisky--the best you have," he said.

The bar-tender wiped his hands on his duck jacket and took down a squat
bottle.  "O. and S.," he said, affably.  "Just blown in to town?"

Harry stared him in the eye.  "Wrap that thing up, and be quick about
it!" was his answer.

The man in the duck jacket muttered something under his breath, banged
the package on the bar and rang up the payment on the cash-register
with an angry jingle.

Harry thrust his purchase under his arm, went out, crossed the square
and climbed aboard a train that was drawing out.  He went rapidly
forward to the smoker; there he--and the bottle he carried--would be
unnoticed.  As he sat down in the rear seat, the conductor passed by.
Harry had no ticket.  He handed him a bill.

"Where to?" asked the other briefly.

"How far do you go?"

"Birmingham."

"To Birmingham, then," said Harry.

The afternoon wore on, station after station went by.  The man in the
rear seat sat with his eyes straight before him, moveless except as
from time to time he lifted a bottle to his lips and drank thirstily,
avidly.  The frenzied pain was gone now, leaving only a dull ache, and
gradually, very gradually, this too slipped away into the void.  He was
now once more the man who had fled in his motor from the face of a
convict in a court-room, flying through the night in a jumbled dream,
strung upon a headlong speed through vacuity.

Evening came, with the glamour of peach-blown valleys and honey-lipped
hills, lying under pale stars against the sunset.  Night fell, with its
cooler breeze through the windows, its glimpses of quiet, watching
woods, of white mists wreathing across the meadows, of yellow lights.
But Harry took no heed.  Only hours later, when the train rolled into a
great rotunda did he turn his head.  He did not know where he was.  He
did not even wonder.  He rose, kicked the emptied bottle under the
seat, and left the train.

He went out of the station.  It sat on a ridge above a great river and
on the lower level he had a glimpse of a sordid purlieus of rambling
streets, red-paned windows and gleaming doorways, the soiled earmarks
of the city's slums.

He crossed the street and plunged aimlessly down a narrow alley toward
the water-front.




CHAPTER XVII

LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

The potations in the smoking-car had had their first effect.  Sevier
had passed from the jumbled dream now--was safe enisled in that strange
fourth-dimensional empire into which he had first wandered during that
wild night-ride in his motor, that region of tense consciousness that
was yet without rule, in which every sense was acute, his brain clear
as ice, but where impressions recorded themselves without
co-ordination.  Eye and ear drank in avidly each sight and sound, and
he sniffed the thick smells as a hound sniffs a haunting but forgotten
trail.

As he went further the dwindling signs of respectability vanished.  He
was now below the city's "dead-line" where, in segregated wantonness,
vice and license unrolled their audacities fearless of the complaisant
police regulations.

A hundred yards from the greasy docks lining the sluggish current from
which a plumy mist was lifting, a wide screened doorway showed a blaze
of electric-light upon a patch of saw-dust floor.  Through it poured
the tinny blare of a gramophone hooting a comic song, mingled with
rumbling laughter and raised voices.  It was a low-roofed, shambling
building, planned for the delectation of the barge-man and the
roustabout and now throbbing with their daily--and nightly--pleasures.
Harry halted before it.

"Tough joint, eh?"  The voice fell suddenly at his elbow.

He turned.  The speaker was red-cheeked and brisk, with dapper
sophistication and inquisitiveness written all over him.  His shining
straw hat had a coloured band, there were white pearl buttons on his
patent-leather shoes and a natty stick swung lightly from his gloved
fingers.  "I can see you don't belong with that crowd," he said,
nodding sagely toward the entrance.

"No," said Sevier.  He was staring at the speaker with a penetrating
intensity, thinking that, but for colouring and costume, they two
somewhat resembled each other--speculating as to the slanting scar on
the other's right cheek, that might have been the memento of a rusty
nail or of a pet panther--thinking of these things and of a thousand
things beside that were only remotely connected with either of them.

"Neither do I, but I take a high dive into it now and then.  Let's go
in and have a drink."

In Harry's middle distance another more decorous swing-door vibrated to
and fro, with a sharp smell of hops, a rattle of glasses, a voice
reckless but good-humoured--proposing a like libation.  Beyond this in
endless succession were openings and re-openings of a locked cabinet
that had hung somewhere on a wall, and further yet, myriads of goblets,
cut with shining prisms, reflecting rainbow colours on spotless napery.
A drink?

"Why not?" he said, and striking open the door, led the way into the
noisy interior, reeking with stale odours, with strong tobacco-smoke,
with carouse and profanity.  He strode across the floor, shouldering
his way unceremoniously through the press, and sat down at a small deal
table that was unoccupied.  His companion seated himself opposite.  He
was looking at Harry with critical admiration, noting his lithe
athletic build and the certain, confident swing of his movements.  His
eye lighted.

"Gad!" he said, with a little laugh.  "To tell the truth I wouldn't
have cared to come in here alone, though I've been in a good many shady
boozeries.  Allow me to introduce myself.  My name's John Stark--that's
the name I play under, that is.  I'm an actor.  I'm trying out a new
play, the 'Jail-bird.'  Perhaps you've seen the bill-boards."

"Of course," said Harry.  The title sprang instantly into his mind,
blazoned on a gaudy bill-board against a maple-shaded street:

  "Do not fail to see this Talented Star
  In his Gripping Drama, _The Jail-Bird_."


It multiplied, stamping itself on a thousand walls, a chromatic
procession tumbling into the distance.  The other nodded in a
self-satisfied way.  "It's a great play.  Got the real human dope in
it.  It'll go big, too.  That's why I come to these places--to study
'business.'  See that teamster with the pock-marked face and the tattoo
on his arm?  What a make-up that would be!"

The burly, half-drunken driver, in red-flannel shirt with a snake-whip
in his armpit, his back to the bar, poured from a gurgling black
bottle.  "Hear what it says?" he hiccoughed--"'It's
good--s'good--s'good--s'good--s'good!'"

John Stark withdrew his eyes from the fascinating study, as a waiter,
in an apron that had in some remote epoch aspired to white, with a
strip of soiled towelling thrown over one arm, set two thick glasses on
the table, with a surly "well?"

"I'll take a silver fizz," said the actor.

"The same," said Sevier--"and be quick about it!"

The harsh admonition thrust across the noise.  The phrase had no
meaning to Sevier, it had been merely the echo of another bidding that
he had given at some other time, in some other world, repeating itself
now when the hidden spring of association was touched.  But it brought
a resentful glare from the waiter.  The loungers standing nearest
shuffled truculently, and the teamster by the bar turned an ugly look
upon them.  The man in the dingy apron thumped down a black demijohn on
the table.

"Take it straight or not at all," he said in a surly tone.

Harry's companion poured both glasses.  He leaned across the table with
sparkling eyes.  "I'm in the title-role," he confided.  "The story is
like this.  I'm a business man, and the other chap--he has a grudge
against me--has me in his power.  He's the Great What Ho--a regular
top-notcher, plenty of money, a winner with the women, horses,
steam-yacht, everything.  The house he lives in was mine, but he's got
it by trickery and seized it while I was abroad.  I come back and find
him in possession.  But in the house--he doesn't know this, you
see--hidden behind a panel in the library, are papers that will show
him up and put him behind the bars.  I've got to have those papers, and
the only way is to get into the place and take them."

He paused and sipped from the glass before him, then resumed:

"Curious thing, luck.  I've had no end of trouble getting up the
scenery, but to-day I saw exactly the lay-out I want to picture--a
whacking big house in this very town.  Right in the heart of the city
too, not a mile from here, but shut in from the road.  Belongs to about
the richest man in the place.  I kodaked it for my scene-painter.  Look
here."

He took a pencil from his pocket and sketched rapidly on the deal
table-top as he went on.

"It's set in trees and there's a wide, oval porch along the front--like
this--fine old southern effect, eh?--with Cape Jessamine bushes under
the windows.  A long wing runs down one side--here.  In there is the
library.  I come on in a kind of prologue, no lines--shadows and
moonlight, town-hall clock striking off one side--you know.  I'm
desperate.  I try the doors.  They're locked, of course.  B

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